


keep these bridges burning

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: Apocalypse Prevented, Breaking Up & Making Up, M/M, Post-Apocalypse Prevented, Post-Break Up, Urban Fantasy, edit: god i can't believe chet's actual name is actually kevin. what the hell.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-14 21:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 31,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13016145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: No one had told them there would be aftermath to saving the world.They were supposed to be heroes. They were supposed to be godlings. They kind of had been. They had saved the whole world, him and Sajeeb. There wasn't supposed to be aftermath.But such, as they say, is life.





	1. to go where love is alive

**Author's Note:**

> a couple of dedications:
> 
> the chet dialogue is dedicated to andy, without whom i might have stayed home that night  
> the foundation of this fic is thanks to jenna, for letting me take her tix to that show  
> the witchery details are 100% rosa's advice, thank you so much  
> beta by moliver, bless you  
> and a final dedication to myself for doing 20k on finals week, you crazy bastard. get some sleep. 
> 
> enjoy xoxo

Chris edges onto the packed train car past someone grown into the seat by the door. 

They’re gnarled and weathered and beetle-iridescent around the eyes, watching through a waterfall of thin brown rootlets as Chris elbows enough space for himself and his bag. They shift with the sway of the train and Chris nods to them affably when he realizes they’re going to stare until he acknowledges them. 

The train starts moving with a lurch and Chris gets his elbow around the pole and rests his temple against the cool steel. The train lurches again and Chris's bag shifts, glass tinkling against itself, musical, a climbing scale he silences with a hum and a tap to his bag. 

The tree in the seat by the door is still watching him. Their roots have twined with the struts braced against the wall of the train, shifting in nearly imperceptible motion. They smile when Chris blinks at them and nod slowly, rootlets shifting, eyes closing and opening in a gesture of respect.

Chris looks back at his feet.

* * *

The storefront he rents now is modest, a deep recessed window warded six layers deep to keep the graffiti and unwelcome stares away. Charms on strings to anchor luck and good will, any conceivable advertisement of their services crowded out by the leaves of the riotous jungle Kevin refuses to trim or arrange in any _marketable_ way other than ‘the way the plants like to be’. 

Chris finds it difficult to argue when Kevin brings up how partnering with one half of the saviors of the world doesn't leave the business with a shortage of clients. He likes the plants anyway, the cheerful vines sending sneaking inquisitive tendrils under the sink in the break room, the viciously alive bromeliads that nearly crowd out their front display window, the dour little cactus Kevin had snuck into the corner of Chris's office because he insists it likes him. 

Chris doesn't speak to plants. He has a feeling the cactus prefers it that way. Their bond is a silent one. 

Kevin hasn't left any folders on his desk and so he spends a little while spinning in his chair, pushing himself back and forth with the toe of his shoe. Back and forth, staring at nothing, bored and a little anxious with it. It's been a little while since their last job. 

Kevin is singing to the vines in the hallway as he passes, voice wordless and throaty and comforting in its familiarity. 

He doesn't precisely mean to when he reaches into his bag, pulls the first bottle out. He mostly means to just unpack. It really is an accident that his hand grabs the quicksilver first. 

It's something he tries not to do most of the time. He's really good at respecting boundaries these days. No more playing with fire. No more pushing the limits just to see which of them gives first, headlong and reckless and so fated it had hurt to look away. 

It still hurts down in the scarred over places he doesn't go so much, though it's better now. He's healed, and still healing. He's healthy. 

He just misses Sajeeb. 

The quicksilver pools in the bottle, humming and receptive. 

He doesn't need to pour it into a dish, never really has. He does for form's sake sometimes, something to make other people comfortable, but alone in his office all he does is tilt the bottle and watch it swirl. Like a puppy it obeys, clumsy and eager to show him what he wants to see, a rush of vertigo motion and then glow spilling out over his fingers. 

He leans in close. 

“Chris!” Kevin calls as he opens the door and the quicksilver nearly breaks the glass of its bottle with how fast Chris yanks himself free. He nearly drops it all over the floor in trying to shove it into the side drawer of his desk. 

He forgets, sometimes. He forgets how bright Sajeeb is. He's blinking spots from his vision as he finally gets the bottle tucked away. Kevin is watching him reproachfully but he doesn't say anything about it and Chris is thankful. 

Instead he throws a folder at Chris's head. 

He trusts Chris to be able to catch it in flight, and Chris can, but he can't pretend there isn't more of that reproach in the force of Kevin’s throw as he gathers the papers hovering in the air into his hands. 

Kevin hadn't understood much about Sajeeb and what had happened and how Chris had just forgiven him. Chris has never been able to find the words to explain how there hadn't been anything _to_ forgive, and so it had gone. Kevin resents Sajeeb. Resents him because he believes Chris can't. Chris tires himself out just thinking about it and so he doesn't argue. 

“Found a good case,” Kevin says instead of mentioning the bottle in Chris's side drawer. “I'll make coffee.”

* * *

It's a really good case. A bad curse because that's what Chris is good at these days. Saving the world doesn't pay the rent, but breaking curses does. 

The coven hiring them gives them directions to a little house in the suburbs. Half an hour's drive when they're late enough to avoid the morning traffic, Kevin behind the wheel juggling coffee and the steering wheel and batting the papers Chris shuffles at him out of his line of sight until they nearly swerve into the opposite lane and Chris subsides with a grin. 

The suburbs just bore him. The suburbs have always bored him, compared to the way cities always pulse like a heartbeat, so close to alive that the shade of difference doesn't matter at all. They like him, cities. They welcome him in and fold him up tight in secrets and history and runes coded into the patterns of the bus lines. 

There isn't as much life in the suburbs. Nothing like it. They drive past gardens and lawns and pastel houses that blur together until Chris is nearly asleep. Monotony, lulling him into a doze. So he doesn't feel the curse until they're turning into the street the house must be on and he wakes up a little, opens his mouth and looks over to Kevin because there's something there niggling at the corner of his vision. 

Kevin’s mouth is moving like he's trying to say something but Chris can't hear him because

 

_grabbing him by the back of the throat with a grin full of needles in his veins and in his eyes and slicing in towards his bones, surgical tools so cold it hurts and he's drowning in it water in his lungs until it burns because it is ice on fire_

 

_it is not fire_

 

__you wanna play with fire, _he thinks with anger roaring through him a hurricane,_ you don't know shit about fire __

 

_gripping the cold digging into mouth and nose and eyes and it hurts, hooked into him as needles trying to sew itself under his skin but it isn't stronger than him and it isn't fire and he doesn't have the patience to untangle it so he yanks it free never mind the pain of hooks ripping from_

 

he's back in the car in the deserted suburban street again and they're pulled to a totally illegal stop and Kevin is leaning across the dashboard with a hand on his shoulder, his mouth open like he'd just been yelling. 

“What, shit,” he says belatedly and realizes his voice is hoarse. His throat hurts like he'd been shouting, though he has no idea if he had been or not. He isn't sure of anything that happened outside of the curse. It had felt like an instant but he thinks it must have been more like thirty seconds. 

“You convulsed,” Kevin says. He's calm in the way that means in no way is he actually calm. Chris can see the whites all the way around his eyes. “You were making this noise, like…” 

He trails off. Chris works to swallow down the ache in his throat. It stings and reminds him unpleasantly of needles. He carefully doesn't look down the street at where the bastard thing is crouched over the innocuous house. It's beaten back, for now, as much as a thing like that can be beaten into submission. 

“Don't make that noise again,” Kevin finishes at last and laughs hollowly. 

Chris nods. Puts his hand on Kevin’s where it's resting on his shoulder until Kevin's breathing slows. 

“Just the curse catching me off guard,” he says quietly. “Won't let it happen again, dude.” 

Kevin nods, shakes himself, gets his hand back and belatedly puts the car in gear and starts it moving back down the road towards the house and the curse. Chris peers out of the car, watches the noon sun glint off dusty windows and feels the malignant purpose bend their way. 

“This one's a fucking hell of a curse,” he murmurs and Kevin snorts breathless agreement.

* * *

The woman that answers the door is tall and has eyes that look like they had been knives once upon a time. She stares at them impassively, blocking the threshold, and in the interminable moment where they stare at each other Chris feels her reach out across the distance between them and pluck immaterial fingers at his wards. Nothing threatening, only watchful and testing the mettle of them. 

He shrugs her away and smiles at her apologetically when her eyes sharpen on him. She nods and moves aside to let them in. 

Kevin mutters something about witches as they go that Chris doesn't entirely catch and the woman feigns deafness to with a smile playing at the corners of her mouth in a way that means Kevin hasn't really caused any offense yet. Chris elbows him just to be sure. 

“Come,” she murmurs and spins in a fan of dark hair. They dutifully follow her into the house. 

It's easier to feel the passive weight of the curse here, the dark hollowness of the building above them pressing down onto them with psychic weight. It's strong, and subtle, and Chris spends a few steps tightening his wards until he can barely feel it. Precautionary; he wants to make a good impression on their clients before he gets a reputation for having seizures in the middle of conversations. 

The hallways are clean and cheerfully pastel and absolutely bare, and Chris doesn’t have much time to take it in before the woman whose name he still doesn’t know is gesturing them into an open, airy living room. 

There’s a couch against one wall, obtrusively dusty. A crooked rug on the floor. A kitchen through the opposite doorway, as bare as the hallway had been. It looks barely lived in, or as if the tenants had vacated. 

Two woman watch them enter from the corner by the couch, violently pink and impeccable blonde, gathered together defensively. For a moment they’re only studying each other across the room, and so Chris can see the instant recognition breaks across the face of the woman in pink. 

“You brought the _dude that saved the world_ to lift our curse?” the woman with the pink hair asks, incredulous. 

“Harmony!” the blonde snaps. Chris tries and he suspects fails to swallow a grin. 

“I go by Chris,” he puts in mildly. 

“I'm Kevin,” Kevin volunteers. 

There's a moment, precarious, where Harmony and the blonde woman are looking at them with distrust that isn't unfamiliar when afflicted by a curse but wounds Chris's professional pride nonetheless. Chris is just steeling himself to step forward and plead their case when the woman who had greeted them at the door steps forward. 

“You call me Momiji,” she says, regal in extending a hand as if it isn't a strategic olive branch. Chris takes it and shakes it once, firmly. Momiji turns to the other two in another swirl of dark hair and power that tingles like a reproach. 

“I got the best,” she says flatly. They're all abruptly ignoring Chris and Kevin, something crackling between them fast and tense and impossible to catch a good look at. “And cheap.”

“Hey,” Chris says, wondering if he should be offended. Their fees are reasonable, he'd thought. They ignore him as if he hadn't even spoken, that crackling current of something half magic and half passive aggression still running a circuit between them. 

“They're good cursebreakers?” Harmony asks at last. It seems to break whatever tension there had been because the blonde smiles and Momiji nods once. 

They look at Chris at last. 

“I did save the world one time,” Chris says modestly, and that ends up being that.

* * *

The outer layer of the curse is a maze. 

It takes them the better part of the day to glean a good look at it, Kevin laid out face down on the front lawn to better hear the whisper of the roots in the soil and Chris walking sunwise circles spiraling in from the borders of the property towards the walls of the house. 

They go back to the office with the sunset blazing into the rear view mirrors and the radio on down low enough that it's only white noise and the murmur of voices in the background filling the car. The maze is building itself behind Chris's eyes, reluctant and thorny, and he has to work to tease it free of the scattered hints he'd gleaned. 

They haven't seen to the center of the maze yet but they lay out big sheets of butcher paper in the candlelight and start scribbling in the details they had managed to snatch with sticks of chalk. It's definitely a maze of some kind, maybe a labyrinth. 

“This thing makes exactly _no_ sense,” Kevin says and sets down his chalk. 

“It didn't feel classical,” Chris agrees thoughtfully, jabs a finger at a snarl of tangled corners Kevin had been sketching. “But this layer, this maze, do you think whoever cast it bound in a guardian?”

Kevin hums and wipes at his mouth with the back of his wrist. There's a smear of yellow chalk dust across his cheek. 

“Depends,” he says at last. “How many layers do you think this thing has?”

It's a good question. Chris thinks about it, casts his gaze across the maze they're drawing in across their office floor. There's something off about the shape of it, humps and sharp corners jutting out unexpectedly, curving arcs where by a classical tradition there should be angles and straight lines. 

He thinks about the moment in the car, needles digging into him, cold like someone had bound an arctic winter into his bones and the earth beneath his feet. The grin of something almost alive plunging itself towards his heart. 

“At least five,” he says at last, ignores Kevin’s noise of shock. “If this layer doesn't have some kind of guardian we're gonna hit one at some point.”

“Jesus,” Kevin says faintly.

* * *

Chris falls asleep as soon as his head hits his pillows and he’s managed to drag his blanket up over himself. He dreams of dark hallways filing off into eternity, of grit shifting under his feet as he walks, of a ball of glowing thread in his hand.

* * *

The drive to the house the next day is uneventful. Boring, the curse quiet even as they pull up in the driveway. 

Chris isn't fooled. He stays watchful as Momiji lets them in and then bows out with quiet words and a pale tightness around her eyes that has Chris bundling her out as fast as he can and promising to lock up behind them. 

Some people are just sensitive. Chris wonders how she'd managed the week she said they'd all lived here before deciding they couldn't handle the curse without outside intervention. There is some suggestion in the brittleness of her posture. 

“Thank you,” she says as she goes and ducks her head, oddly formal. They lock the door shut behind her and start their circles again. 

Without spectators the work is easier and more grim. The lines just aren't making sense. He follows them in circles that end and then loop back on themselves to end again, pathways to and from nowhere. Tangles of corners that don't make sense, a shape too irregular to support such a solid spell. The geometries don't make sense and it bothers him. 

He stands to the north of the house facing back towards it and looks, turning his bottle of quicksilver over and over in his hands.

* * *

It follows him into his dreams. He's still wandering old hallways, labyrinthine and dim and absolutely empty, a ball of glowing thread in hand unwinding as he goes. 

He wakes up almost exasperated with the heaviness of the metaphor and tries not to think about minotaurs.

* * *

Kevin has a smudge of graphite on his forehead and green chalk dusted like snow through his beard. It would be funny except he's scowling and running chalk-dusted hands through his wild hair like it'll calm him down and anyway Chris is in no mood to find anything funny right now. 

They've been arguing for an hour over the patternless hallways at the center of the map, at the way they twist like every other section of the maze and absolutely nothing like a geometric center. It just doesn't make _sense_ , the maze isn't stable enough to support itself without an anchor and neither of them had been able to find the signs of one. 

“It just doesn't make sense,” Kevin argues, redundant, exactly what both of them have been saying to each other for hours. Chris shrugs and rubs the bridge of his nose. 

“None of it makes sense,” he snaps back. “I don't know what the fuck _I'm_ supposed to do about that.” 

Kevin glares at him through the wild tangle of his hair. 

“Sorry,” Chris says when the silence goes on long enough to be damning. He isn't very sorry at all and Kevin probably knows that but he shrugs acceptance anyway. 

“Maybe we should head home for the night,” he says instead of calling Chris's bullshit, reaching out and swiping the chalk out of Chris's hand. Chris lets him, watches him rattle all the chalk into its box and start bundling up their drawings to be piled into a neat little ward to keep outside influences away. 

The little ache through the bridge of his nose is making thinking slow and fuzzy. 

He looks down at his hands, empty. Thinks of the dream, the halls that he can never seem to make sense of. 

The ball of thread in his hand, glowing. 

Oh. 

“It's _not a maze_ ,” Chris realizes and then he's on his feet, whirling and yanking the pile of papers out of Kevin’s hands and gesturing them out to settle across the floor in their rightful places. For a moment he's the eye of a hurricane of white paper, directing them in vast sweeps of his arms. He can almost see it already, a realization settling in at the loose curves, improbable corners of what they'd stupidly just assumed to be a maze. 

“What the shit,” Kevin says, faux-pleasant, and Chris beckons him over to point wildly at the snarl they'd been trying to figure out. 

“It's not a maze,” he repeats and he's aware there's a grin slashing across his face that's a little bit manic but the rush of beating this fucker at their own game is powerful. “It's a _knot_.”

* * *

They walk more circles, Kevin with his eyes out toward the trees and Chris with his gaze towards the house and his hands loose at his side. The shape of the knot is becoming clearer with every pass, now that they know what they're looking at. 

The curse isn't fighting back yet and it kind of worries Chris. He hadn't expected much trouble, not for the first layer. It's the clever equivalent of a garden gate keeping out the idly curious. 

Still. There should be something. Some reaction as they wear a circle into the witch's lawn. In Chris's experience, curses don't like to be looked at. 

“It's oriented north,” Kevin tells him quietly. Kevin knows things about cardinal directions, the swing of the sun, the shape of things that are known by plants. Knows them inherently, by instinct, where Chris would have to study the knot design for hours to glean the fact. 

He nods and keeps circling. 

It kind of feels like the curse is watching them, sometimes. He does his best to ignore it. It's not possible and anyway it's all his imagination. Ascribing too much to a magical construct with intelligence by only the loosest of definitions; he won’t cede ground to the thing, not yet. 

He keeps his hand close to where his knife sits in his pocket, though. When he glances up at the shine of the windows his throat still hurts with the impression of needles and cold. 

He doesn’t want to underestimate it, either.

* * *

They set themselves up on the front porch because it's the northernmost point of the house and where Chris can see the knot most clearly. It takes them a little while, laying down a salt circle and arranging the pads Chris had bought to sit on after not noticing his legs falling asleep a few jobs ago had nearly cost him the ability to walk for a few days. He sets out the things Chris uses to focus, things he doesn't necessarily need but that free up more of him to deal with whatever may come.

The bottle of quicksilver in front of him to improve his sight. His obsidian knife at his knee, just in case. A clover, for the luck and just because Kevin likes them. 

He cheerfully bundles up until he's almost unbearably warm and laughs at Kevin, just a nose and a tuft of beard sticking out of the faux fur of the jacket. He's giddy with something, nerves and the task ahead of him and the fact that he is about to affect real change. Strike something back at the fucking curse. 

He forces himself to settle, once he's got himself situated. Kevin facing him, excavated enough from his jacket to see, Chris's necessary tether back to reality. It's getting cold already, autumn afternoon giving way to an evening with teeth to it, the jackets and gloves needed to keep his body safe while he wanders. 

The reverie is as easy as breathing. As easy as closing his eyes and stepping gently outside himself, standing and leaving his body behind. All he's left as is a bundle of thoughts and the faintest impression of his body, a wet weight he's shed except for the faintest of nostalgias. 

Kevin is staring right at him and that never stops being freaky as shit, the way Kevin’s eyes follow him even though he can't see the way Chris can. 

He turns his back, walks to the door and looks down.

At the familiar ball of glowing thread in his hands. It's cold and feels sharp when he teases at a loop of it. 

_Of course,_ he thinks, because of course, and gets to work. 

There's no guardian here. Nothing to stop him but the grueling tedium of unraveling this knotted tangle. 

It’s cleverly done, every loop purposefully designed to snarl around the questing fingers of his thoughts, a noose latching around any part of himself Chris lets stray. It hurts, he can feel that much. Ache building ghostlike in the hands of the body at the other end of the tether Kevin maintains for him. Stinging through his fingers, up his arms, a pounding throb in his head that would distract him if he weren’t so far down. 

Here, in the greying darkness, a ball of glowing thread unraveling under his attention, there is no concept of pain. There is only patiently tugging on the threads. 

The undoing of it is its own form. The necessity of adhering to something enough like logic to pass as a maze. It’s almost like solving a maze in the end. 

He finishes what had been to him a small eternity later but when he tugs exhaustedly on his tether to Kevin and is gently eased back into his body the sun is barely peeking up over the horizon again. Pale morning light, cleansing and soothing to his sore eyes when he blinks blearily into it. Kevin looks terrible, eyes red-rimmed and hands a little shaky when Chris lifts a limp fist to be bumped. 

The outer layer of the curse; the weakest and easiest, the one that fought him the least. Still his hands hurt like he's been submerging them in ice water, his body aching with exertion. He'll take wins as they come but there's something about how hard it had been on him that makes him nervous. 

“Fuck you,” Chris declares hoarsely to the silent house behind them and lets himself slump over onto his side. His back fucking _hurts_.

* * *

They take a day, which Chris doesn't love but both of them need. He aches to dig his nails into the curse layer by layer, to rip it away like an old, rotten bandaid, but they both need rest. 

He putters around the apartment instead of thinking about the curse. Puts a record in his record player and does the dishes piling up in the sink, dutifully waters the plants Kevin’s loaded him down with over the years. Instead of ordering out he makes food for himself. Stir fry, heavy spices, delicious and warming the kitchen until he's humming to himself and dancing while eating over the sink. It feels good. 

When he falls into bed he can still feel the bite of thread into the tips of his fingers.

* * *

Harmony answers the door this time and Chris grins at her winningly. 

She smiles in return, a grudging turn at the corner of her mouth and then stepping aside to let them in. 

“You look,” she says as she ushers them down the hall and then pauses. “Less tired,” she settles on. Kevin laughs and elbows Chris until she glances back at him and he subsides nervously. 

“We're not staying here while the curse is still here,” she explains, handing over a key. “It just…” she shudders, an involuntary shiver of motion and then a glance deeper into the house. 

There's silence for a moment. 

“It's bad for our craft,” she says at last, which isn't untrue but isn't the whole truth either. Chris lets it be. It's not really his job, talking to the clients about their issues. He's the savior of the world, not a therapist. 

“We'll deal with it,” he promises reassuringly anyway, and smiles his sunniest smile when Harmony looks at him. The stiffness goes right out of her after a moment, shoulders softening. 

“If I were you,” she says quietly, “I wouldn't stay the night here.” 

Her makeup is flawless and warm but Chris suddenly wonders if it hides bruises of sleep deprivation. It's common, in curses. He wonders if they know that. He wonders if it would be rude to leave an unobtrusive pamphlet on cleansing curse taints with her. 

“Thanks, but don’t worry about it. I like my own bed,” he says and Harmony smiles at him with more real warmth than politeness for the first time. 

“I’ll leave you to it,” is all she says, still polite but with good humor this time, and then she’s gone and her car is moving away down the street. 

He can't really pay it too much attention. He’s already feeling out the edges of this new layer of the curse, not paying enough attention to what his hands are doing. In the end Kevin has to take the stacks of note paper from his hands, appropriate the box of chalk before Chris drops it and breaks all of it. Chris lets him. He barely notices. 

When Kevin is finished fussing he settles with his back to the front door facing down the hall, presses his palms to the floor and closes his eyes.

It's motion, that's what he feels first. Endless motion meant to echo a tide ebbing in and out and wearing down the spirit of anyone inside the property like beach glass. It's clever, malicious and clever and like the tides tied to some kind of cycle. 

He just can't figure out _what_. 

It's late afternoon when he finally surfaces, heavy with nausea and vertigo, Kevin staring down at him with equal parts curiosity and reproach. 

“I'm fine,” Chris promises preemptively. It would be more convincing if he could get himself to his feet but somehow all he can do is list sideways and stare up at the disapproving moue of Kevin’s mouth. Kevin rolls his eyes. 

“What did you find?” he prompts, bending and getting his hands under Chris's armpits to heave him to his feet. Chris is a little steadier there, swaying and bracing himself against Kevin’s shoulder but staying upright. 

“It's anchored somewhere in the house,” Chris mumbles and gestures down the hall. “Most likely here or in the basement, but I can't, I couldn't fucking _pinpoint_ -”

Kevin shakes him, a gentle settling motion. His mouth snaps shut and he lifts a shaky hand to knuckle under an eye. 

“We'll figure it out,” he tells Chris and it shouldn't calm him down but he feels his shoulders drop from around his ears anyway. He sighs and Kevin shakes him again companionably. 

“It's anchored but the effects are tied to some kind of cycle, I was thinking lunar but it's not? I can't figure out where the anchor would be without the right cycle,” he says slowly. The motion is still there at the corners of his vision, an empty tide pulling out and out and out and threatening to fall back in on them at any moment. 

“There's no other way,” Kevin questions, nudging him into motion heading down the hall. Chris bobbles for a moment, loose in his joints because he still doesn't fit under his own skin quite right. His sense for the curse is receding as he builds his wards back up, layers between himself and how much it hurts to look at. 

“We could just like, tear out the wallpaper and drywall and floorboards and shit and maybe, _maybe_ find the anchor but I don't think Momiji would love that,” he says dryly. 

“No, let's not piss her off,” Kevin agrees, genuinely nervous, and Chris feels the last of the curse slipping from the edges of himself as he laughs.

* * *

He goes home after they've spent so long paging through reference books and old stacks of notes that typeface has started to blur into a kind of abstract art. All they've found is the same shit he already knows, that most magic tied to cyclical time relies on the solar or lunar cycle. It's not exactly helpful. 

He sways home on the train and rubs at a temple against the headache. The motion of it is nauseating, reminds him too much of the tidal shift of the curse. 

There's something missing. It's a feeling he doesn't like very much, the feeling that something’s been gotten over on him. The caster of this ugly curse laughing at him for missing something obvious. 

He doesn't want to think about Sajeeb as he curls up on the couch and stares down into the mug of tea he doesn't have any particular desire to drink, but there's something about way the tea smells and the exhaustion tugging him down and down. It's a certain kind of hurting that he can't stop poking at like a missing tooth. He thinks about Sajeeb laughing, embers on his tongue, burning bright and hot and beautiful in Chris's veins.

* * *

He wakes to thin, unfriendly early morning sun through his front window and a crick in his neck from sleeping sideways against the arm of the couch. There's cold tea drying tacky into the threads of the carpet.

* * *

“It's just too long to be the lunar cycle,” he repeats, and Kevin growls and throws the book he's holding back onto the table. 

“ _Everything_ uses the lunar cycle,” he snaps back. “I don’t know what the fuck else it could be, you said it was shorter than a year round?” 

Chris hauls in a breath through his nose and lays his hands carefully on the cool granite of the table top. Pushes his frustration down and out through his palms because it’s petulant and destructive and not Kevin’s fault anyway. He still isn’t fully settled in himself, still feeling the swirl of motion in his chest that's so familiar and yet hadn't matched up to anything quite right. 

“Yeah,” he says and the shrugs. “It’s not even by season, it’s just…” 

He pauses, shrugs again and finally lets himself pull his hands away from the table. The granite where they had been is a little scorched but he feels better. 

“Doesn’t fit. It’s sitting counter to it by what felt like... maybe a few days? I’ll need to go look again to see more.” 

Kevin reaches past him to thumb at the soot in the shape of Chris’s hands and makes a disapproving noise as it wipes off. 

“Show off,” he mumbles and then sighs and wipes his thumb on the corner of Chris's jacket. Chris nobly lets him, reasons that he'll need to scrub away the soot and magical influence anyway and besides, if it makes Kevin feel better. The tension has bled from the room as easily as it had risen. 

“We’re gonna have to go back to the house anyway,” he reasons. “We’ll figure out something.” 

“You're cleaning that up first,” Kevin says, pointing at Chris's blackened handprints. He sighs and goes to get the paper towels and sea salt.

* * *

Harmony and the blonde - Victoria, she'd finally introduced herself as - arrive halfway through Chris’s second dive into the curse of the day. 

He’s peripherally aware of them in the way he’s aware of everything on the other side of his eyelids; he’s moving among it but apart from it, wading through the curse and sliding over the walls, hoping something about them strikes his attention. Harmony and Victoria are pillars of metal and crystal and wreathing incense, when he’s seeing like this, different from but not unlike the oaky strength of Kevin’s presence tethering him down. 

He moves farther into the house, ignoring them as they watch him. There are currents here, currents moving and shifting as time passes. He can’t distill them down into patterns yet, not without the right time signature, but he thinks he’s certain the anchor isn’t in the top floor. 

He’s coughing when he comes up. His lungs don’t like it when he’s gone so long, protesting shallow sips of air for hours at a time. He lets it pass, coughs until his lungs have settled and his skin feels less like a theoretical boundary and more like his reality. 

Victoria extends a mug of tea to him and he jumps. 

“Hello,” she says wryly when he takes it and nods his thanks. “It’s just earl grey.” 

“Thank you,” he croaks politely and takes a sip. It’s warm but not too hot and steeped perfectly, which doesn’t surprise him at all. Victoria seems to be the kind of person that would take pride in her perfect tea. She watches him carefully until he smiles up at her and then she nods decisively. 

Harmony isn’t nearby and neither is Kevin, but he can hear dishes rattling and muffled conversation from the kitchen and he assumes Kevin’s gotten over his nerves at the witches. 

“How is the progress?” she asks and he waves a hand vaguely from the floor. She hasn’t offered to help him stand up yet and he’s kind of grateful; his skin might have settled back into being real, but his legs are still a somewhat shaky proposition. 

“Slower than I like, but going,” he admits easily. “It’s a bad curse.” 

Victoria nods. 

“Thank you,” she says at last, a moment gone that should verge into the awkward but doesn’t. “For doing this.” 

Chris shrugs. It makes him uncomfortable sometimes, this part. The gratitude. He never knows what to do with it. 

“It’s my job,” he says. She nods. 

“Still,” she says, and she’s looking away now, deeper into the house. In the direction of the noises in the kitchen. “This curse, it hits Momiji really hard. So. Thank you.” 

He nods back when she looks back at him and sips his tea. It really is excellent tea. 

“So what's this layer of the curse?” Victoria asks. He breathes out through his nose and tries to grope after the words to describe what the curse’s magic had felt like pressing up against his own. 

“It's like, time-based,” he settles on. “Definitely cyclical with a physical anchor. I'm having trouble triangulating without the right cycle though.”

Victoria looks at him shrewdly. 

“You've checked for lunar or a year-round,” she starts and then laughs as Chris rolls his eyes over the rim of his mug. 

“We checked every reference book we have but, you know.” he shrugs. Makes a vague gesture with his shoulders meant to convey his opinion of the authors of reference books. “No one's bothered to compile an easy list of cycles by length.”

There's a beat and then-

“Have you considered, just like, googling it?” Harmony asks from the doorway to the kitchen. 

Chris stares at her, at Kevin avoiding his gaze right behind her, and there is a very long silence. 

Kevin pulls out his phone. 

“Temporal cycles,” he reads out after some furtive tapping, obviously trying to pretend all their eyes aren’t on him. “Ranked by length.” 

“Well,” Chris says. “Shit.”

* * *

It's Mercury's orbit. 

As soon as Chris sees its sigil reflected back at him from Kevin’s cracked, grainy phone screen the sense of rightness settles something ticking anxiously in his chest. Another layer understood, not yet peeled away but still defined enough that unlocking it will be easy.

Easier than it could be. 

He doesn’t know why he didn’t realize sooner. He has enough affinity for quicksilver - mercury, he’s such a stupid idiot, _mercury_. 

He doesn't let himself wallow for long. It's useless when they've finally figured it out, when they're all set to banish another layer. He spends a minute muttering at himself and kicking the baseboard and moves on. 

He doesn't have it in him to do a full immersion, not without a full night's rest, but he dips back in for a little while. If he hadn't been sure before then the way he can dance in the currents now convinces him, sure of his footing in a way that isn't trust so much as knowledge. He knows the patterns now. 

He's grinning when he pulls back out. Kevin grins back happily.

* * *

He draws Mercury's sigil on his left palm and puts his bottle of quicksilver in his right pocket, and he feels the gravity of the planet's orbit drawing at him before he's even stepped outside himself. It's difficult to wait for Kevin to be ready but he forces himself to, tapping impatient fingers against his leg. 

Harmony is here again today, doing something in the front yard that Chris suspects she thinks is a better cover for watching them than it really is. He doesn't really mind. She's out of the way and when he puts his back to the front door and steps halfway out of himself he can't even really see her. 

It's difficult, seeing like this. Bridging the gap between what he can feel pressing against his spirit and making his body move. It's ponderous and slow but he forces himself into motion because it's the best way. 

Moving through the house is dreamy, trancelike, a dance of Kevin steering him carefully away from the walls and then stepping back again to let him keep going. It's Chris fording the motion of the curse, the tide washing back and forth between the walls like real water, seeking the source of the strongest currents. 

It's difficult though to keep his balance, difficult to press on through the waves of it as it tries to push him back. Dumb and uncomprehending force, heavy and wearing on him by the fact of its nature. He pushes on anyway, closes his eyes sometimes just to feel the direction the flow of it is coming from. 

He almost falls down the stairs to the basement before Kevin gets a hand around his arm and yanks him back. Chris looks back at him blearily and then back down the stairs into the dark maw of the basement. 

The curse is bubbling up from there, flowing out over his feet and pressing against his legs in what he can almost see from the corner of his eye, a rush of dirty frothing water. 

“It's down there,” he says muzzily and Kevin just nods. 

They go down the steps carefully, the footing more treacherous than it should be. It's the water of the curse, and Chris can see the purpose of this layer more clearly than ever. A wearing down of emotions and strength, sapping the warmth from anyone inside the house in bad luck and little accidents and ugly frustrations. Subtle and awful. 

They make it to the bottom without slipping and as soon as he gets a foot on the concrete floor he knows. 

“There,” he mumbles and points vaguely at the wall directly opposite the stairs. Without any interfering walls, Mercury’s pull exacting and distant in his bones, he can feel the curse pushing at him from that direction. 

Kevin sits him down on the bottom step and goes to work. 

There's drywall but no carpeting, nothing but bare cement and a little dusty rug right at the foot of the stairs. Chris shoves at it with a toe and works at easing himself back under his skin as he watches Kevin work. 

It's a little fascinating. He lays his fingertips carefully against the drywall here and there in no pattern Chris can fathom. His face is screwed up like he's listening to someone talk from far away, pained and silent, and Chris tries to quiet his breathing even though he knows it won't make any real difference. 

Kevin stops at last and points to a spot absolutely indistinguishable from every other spot of drywall in the wall. 

“I can hear, just, the weirdest shit here,” he says and shrugs. “I think the anchor’s, uh… Wax?”

Chris grins tiredly and starts trying to haul himself to his feet. 

“Time to get out the sledgehammers,” he says happily. Demolition has always secretly been his favorite part. “Harmony is _not_ going to like this.”

* * *

Harmony doesn't like it but when Chris shows her the little waxen figure bound up in thread she doesn't do more than sigh tragically through her nose at the piles of dust and drywall fragments scattered across the basement cement. Chris grins back as winningly as he can when it's getting a little difficult to stay on his feet. 

He likes her. He likes all of them. He's fond of prickly people. 

Kevin and Harmony argue for almost twenty minutes about how to dispose of the anchor before Chris steps in tiredly and points out that neither of them want the curse anchor in their cars and anyway there's a lovely brick-lined firepit in the backyard. They both look chastised. Chris laughs at them. 

They build the fire up hot and quick and ferocious. Kevin tends it carefully, pushing it as hot as it can go, sticky sap on his fingers. Chris watches, walking a clockwise circle every now and then to keep the energy right. He throws up the wards as a precaution, a wide bowl over them to keep in anything the effigy lets off when it burns. 

He undoes the knots with lazy focus, picking at the wax sticking under his nails to cast into the fire, more banishing rituals gone by than he can remember. It's easy to him now, the motions of it, leaving the thread looped around the effigy. The wax is old, years old. It crumbles under his nails and leaves his hands feeling dirty, but he ignores it. There's time later to cleanse himself of any lingering influences. 

There's very little ceremony in holding the effigy over the fire for a moment and then casting it in. For a beat the effigy is whole, back-lit by the glowing coals and then it starts to melt with a soft noise and the smell of burning wax. 

A moment of satisfaction, the prelude to celebration, and then the wave of backlash hits him like a train. 

He's toppling, a tree felled. Kevin shouts his name, and on his other side Harmony is being noisily sick all over the grass, but Chris can't hear it very well. He can barely hear anything but the rush of his heartbeat speeding like a panicking rabbit. 

Misery, compounded over years and years into a bitter poison rising up like bile. Fear and anger twining up through his veins and it's cold and alien and it burns where it tries to make Chris like itself. The pressurized curse spending itself against him and all he can do is push it back and get control of his body again. 

A starlike nova of pain where he's bitten a hole in his tongue. His mouth is filling slowly with blood and there is something almost but not entirely like frost sealing his jaw shut. He writhes on the ground, jerky and panicked, blood trickling sour and salty down the back of his throat and he can't _fucking breathe_ around it. 

The wave recedes, rolls back out weaker and weaker as the effigy burns. It's crackling merrily. Chris stares at it glassily and sets his shoulder against the magic freezing him still and pushes it off. 

He rolls himself over, forces his jaw open so the blood has somewhere to go and breathes heavily into the grass. 

“That fucking thucked,” he slurs at last, voice thick around his hurting tongue. Harmony makes a weak sound of agreement. Kevin just snorts.

* * *

When he jerks awake in the middle of the night, wet with sweat and panting for breath because all he can feel is the infinite pressure of water dragging him down and down and down, he's hardly surprised.

* * *

The third layer is a maze. 

They spend a long time being sure, checking every iteration of what _else_ it could be before conceding that it is a straightforward if complex circle maze. 

It takes Kevin all of ten minutes to come up with a cardinal direction, too. “East,” is all he says, gestures towards the side of the house with the least windows. This time there’s no hint of trickery, no sign that the caster has hidden their intentions. 

It’s a cruel maze anyway. Every corner designed to draw down bad luck and isolation like a lightning rod, amplifying pain and misery, greedily swallowing down every hint of joy and celebration. The construction is almost runic, something so close to a summoning circle that it makes Chris nervous just having it in his head. 

“There’s _so_ a guardian on this thing,” he mumbles, because he hasn’t seen to the center of the construction yet but if there isn’t some kind of sigil holding a spirit in place then he’ll eat a shoe. Kevin shrugs his agreement, glances at where Chris is holding his stone knife in a gentle grip - just in case, he’s pretty sure nothing can reach outside the maze, but just in case - and nods. 

“We’ll be careful,” he says, which is kind of useless. Chris appreciates the sentiment anyway. 

They go back to the office, ward up the workroom three layers deep and start to draw in what they know. It’s a lot, between the two of them. The maze hadn’t fought to hide itself, which makes Chris even more nervous. They still haven’t seen to the center but he doesn’t really need to, not to solve a maze. 

They'll have to salt down the whole room when they're done with this layer, just in case. A maze like this, drawing it in detail invites things in. It's dangerous enough to draw just parts of it. Chris can feel it tugging uselessly at the wards he’s thrown down over the paper as it is, jagged ends of corners and long hallways drawing down bad luck and ill will like a television aerial. 

It worries him not to know what he’ll be fighting. 

“We're gonna have to solve this one widdershins,” Kevin says softly, nervously. Chris swears, shoving himself back from the worktable in frustration. 

He stares down at the fragments laid out between them on the table. 

The caster had put themselves into this, this curse that's no little thing. So many layers, so much work. Cleverness, anger, malice. A command of spellwork that makes Chris nervous. It doesn't make _sense_ , such a strong and bitter curse tied into a house in the ass end of a suburban road. 

“We should do some research,” he mumbles at last and reaches for his cup of tea. It's gone cold and bitter but he sips it anyway. The space they haven't seen into yet bothers him, a void in their collective sketches that could be filled with anything. 

“Yeah, I feel it too,” Kevin agrees. His hand intrudes into Chris's field of vision and tugs the mug gently away. It takes Chris a sluggish moment to look up. 

Kevin isn't looking at him. He's running careful fingertips over the gnarled curl of a vine, its leaves shifting and swaying to brush against his wrist. Chris wonders what it's saying, what it's murmuring to Kevin that Chris just isn't able to hear. 

There are circles under his eyes, faint blue bruises of sleep deprivation, and it occurs to Chris to worry about him. They are both too absorbed in the work for their own good. 

“Like, why _this_ house,” Kevin continues and glances back to Chris. “I doubt it's the coven, y’know.”

“Curse is too old,” Chris agrees and rocks back on his heels, running his fingers through the greasy tangle of his hair. He’s been backsliding a little bit on sleep, nothing he can’t handle but not exactly good for him either. The way he’s always been about really thorny problems, except this problem is thornier than most and there’s no one bundling him into bed or confiscating the piles of notes he sneaks home in his bag. 

He sighs and shrugs and starts sweeping their pile of papers into a loose stack. 

“Grab me some of the grey ribbon and then head home,” he tells Kevin as he works. “Sleep on it.” 

He leaves the stack of drawings bound up and circled in salt and hopefully harmless. Tries to put it from his mind as he throws leftover stir fry into the microwave and leaves the dishes undone before stumbling to bed. 

Useless effort. He falls asleep with the maze running over and over in his head.

* * *

He takes another day to replenish himself. He’s going to be fighting a guardian more likely than not and he doesn’t relish the idea of doing it running on empty. 

He probably _could_ but he doesn’t like the face Kevin makes when he tells him so. It reminds him a little too much of a mom. Anyway, he appreciates the time to examine the maps they’ve assembled piecemeal and incomplete. 

In the maze he won’t have a map in hand, only logic and what he's painstakingly memorized to guide him. 

They set up in the middle of the afternoon the next day, an empty room with the biggest window looking out east. Pads to sit on, his quicksilver in front of him. They bundle up a little bit because it’s still cold inside. 

There’s no giddiness this time, not like the first time. Just determination. Readiness. He keeps his knife in his hand instead of at his knee because he _will_ need it. 

Kevin settles opposite him and reaches out to tap the back of his hand three times. It makes Chris grin and Kevin grins back, confident in a way that’s a little bit fake but something Chris needs. Kevin will be with him every step that he can, will throw himself into the fray for Chris like he has every time before. A fucking amazing friend. 

He can handle this. He can. 

Stepping outside himself is as easy as it’s always been, standing up and out of his body into the refracted space beyond. It's empty like this which doesn't surprise him; he’d settled down facing North, a nod to the beginning of the curse and a way to limit how this layer can reach back to touch his body. He steels himself. 

He turns to the East and-

He’s at the mouth of the maze. 

To his vision it’s old stone, cold, steeped in damp and misery and suffocated of light. It isn’t real - he can feel Kevin at his back, tethered to him umbilical and warm and necessary, and when he tilts his head he can see the house beyond the illusion of the walls of the maze. It’s all a trick of magic and light, but necessary. 

He pauses a last moment. Takes his knife in hand and steps into the maze. 

For a long time he’s just following the map of the maze he’s built in his head, careful and methodical. He can afford to take the time to be slow, _needs_ to even. Losing himself to the maze might mean not being able to get out, even with Kevin. His body starving to death as he wanders and wanders and loses his sanity. 

Or until he’s eaten by the guardian. He’s expecting it, which is the only reason that the thing doesn’t overwhelm him when it strikes. 

He turns a corner and almost steps into it, stumbles back at the last second, screams and somehow forgets the knife in his hand. 

It’s big, a mass of bone and mouths and needles in his vision, terror that claws at his senses because it doesn’t make any _sense_ , no creature should look like that. Nothing could live like that, and the horror of it makes him sick, so he nearly doesn’t throw up the ward in time. 

It slams into the wall of Chris’s magic and howls, a sound like a psychic blender. The noise grates against Chris’s senses and he shoves back instinctively, ward expanding out and sending the thing rolling away back down the dim hallway. 

He gets a good look at it before it’s around a corner and out of sight. 

A famine spirit. Something built of starvation and wanting and misery. He’s not surprised; it’s a good match for this maze, a guardian easy to fuel on the scraps siphoned from the inhabitants of the house. He throws a little more power into his wards and keeps going. 

Chasing the guardian is a trap, meant to turn him around and confuse him until he can’t find his way back out. His best chance is finding the center of this maze, the place the spirit is bound to, and destroying that. 

His only warning the next time is a creeping tingle at where the back of Chris’s neck would be if he had a definable physical form like this. 

He whirls to find it looming right beyond his wards and ready to crash down on them with all of its weight. 

Chris strikes out with his knife, clumsy and panicked and all reflexive reaction. He gets it in one of the mouths, and the thing screams again and bolts away down the hall into the darkness Chris would go mad trying to see into. 

Spirits don’t bleed but there’s a trail of residue where it had been, a fading trace of foul magic that Chris shudders at and turns away from. He can smell how it would burn if he touched it, corrosive like battery acid, radiating weakness and hunger and pain. It's not worth thinking about.

The map in his head gets shakier the deeper in he gets, the details fading into broad impressions of the way the maze should go. Hypotheses only. He runs into a dead end, backtracks and runs into another before finding the right way. 

It helps that he knows he’s going widdershins, inviting in evil and bad luck. He doesn’t like being stuck in the dead ends, though. He can sense the way the guardian is trailing him, stalking him through the narrow hallways and waiting for its chance to strike again. It would be too easy to get caught between dim walls and it. He hurries out of the dead ends. 

It strikes a final time as he’s reaching spitting distance from the center of the maze. 

The walls are so tightly curved now that he can barely see five feet in any direction, the branching hallways sudden and tight and paranoia-inducing. The instinct is to run, to make a mad dash for the center because it’s so close he can taste it in the tight pressure building against him. He forces himself to go slow instead. He can’t afford mistakes. 

It comes at him quick and from the front, rushing at him so fast that it’s only a split second he gets to react. 

He can’t strike back, doesn’t have the time. He braces himself, drops low and puts everything he can into his ward and watches the thing slide over it, a bare inch overhead. It screams as it goes and it’s clawing at his wards, biting at them, tearing out handfuls of Chris’s power-

Now he runs. 

The center’s close enough that mistakes are almost impossible and the guardian is behind him instead of ahead and anyway he’s seen the last of the maze, he knows where he’s going. The logical center. He runs and runs, the guardian howling right behind him, clawing at the tail of his wards as they go. 

He doesn’t make a mistake. The entrance to the circular little room that makes up the center of the maze glows in his vision and he throws himself through it, puts the last of himself into a ward over it and snarls a reply to the guardian’s frustrated scream when it rebounds off of it. 

It’s a plain little room and he doesn’t bother looking at the details of it, staggers over to the squat, round little altar that makes up the epicenter of this layer. There’s a clay tablet right in the middle, wet as if it’s just been formed, a sigil carved into it that burns in Chris’s vision. It’s evil, and tugging at Chris, daring him to try to decipher it. It wants him to, wants him to look at it, to understand it so it can let itself into him-

He stabs his knife through the center of the sigil, impatient and disinterested in the traditional banishment. 

The maze shatters around him with the shriek of breaking stone. The spirit screams, the buzzsaw of its blender voice as it dies, and Chris grins vacantly into the unnatural human-made light suddenly streaming around him. He’s back in the house. He’s exhausted beyond comprehension, but still. 

He loves to win. 

He doesn't even need to signal; Kevin feels the tug of the layer dying and eases him back into himself at a limping pace. Chris appreciates it. 

His whole body hurts, he discovers with absent disinterest. A diffuse ache, centered around his head and his spine. It takes him a long time to open his eyes. He's just exhausted. Kevin is watching him when he finally manages and he doesn't exactly look so much better but he can get to his feet without stumbling and when _Chris_ tries to lift a hand it trembles. 

Kevin has to haul him to his feet and he's not unfamiliar with it, with this kind of exhaustion. Strung out on unreality and emptied of everything he has to burn. His body feels entirely unreal, the air against his skin too much, enough that when Kevin half-carries him to the car and settles him against the cold pleather of the seat he makes a wounded little noise. 

He wants to sleep. He's already mostly asleep as Kevin buckles him into the seat. 

“You can't keep doing this,” he thinks he hears Kevin say, and he goes into the darkness of unconsciousness thinking that that's entirely silly, because Chris isn't dead yet. Of course he can keep doing this.

* * *

He sleeps until nearly noon. He still has a headache when he finally opens his eyes, there’s still pain threaded through his whole body in leftover swells, but it’s lesser and the exhaustion has abated a little. 

He still wants to sleep for a week but whatever. Whatever, whatever, he has work to do and even if he’s too tired to really do any diving there’s still blueprints to check, measurements to take. There’s something up with this curse. 

There’s nothing pointing specifically to someone trying to hide a body in the walls but Chris has seen CSI. He knows what’s up. 

“You’re insane,” Kevin tells him pleasantly when he makes his way to the office, but when Chris promises him three times and swears on the cactus that he won’t try to project when they’re there he agrees to drive them over. 

“One of these days we’re gonna knock down a wall and a body’s gonna fall out,” Chris replies. He’s holding his biggest travel mug full of shitty gas station coffee and feeling extremely good about it. “And I’ll have fucking told you so.”

* * *

He can’t find any suspicious gaps in the blueprints or unexpectedly thick walls. Not that he was really expecting there to be. It’s more of an excuse to get moving, to get out of his apartment and his own head than anything. 

He’s pretty sure that’s why Kevin had caved so quickly. He tires himself out pretty quickly anyway, not really ready to call it quits so much as running out of his ability to climb the stairs without getting winded. Kevin leaves him by the car to go pack up their stuff and Chris finds himself with his phone in his hand with a certain sense of inevitability. 

He’s been laughing all day but he isn’t sure he’s meant any of it. None of it feels quite right. 

He tries not to let himself call too often, because he knows Sajeeb will pick up and he knows it isn't good for him, for either of them. Only times like now, when the world isn't enough to keep him grounded and everything is starting to float just out of his reach. When he needs to. 

Sajeeb doesn't call him. Chris has made his peace with that. 

“Chris,” Sajeeb says. “Hey.”

It's been so long since he's last seen Sajeeb, he realizes. Almost two years. 

Two years since he'd let Sajeeb lace their fingers together one last time and then leave. Two years, and he's barely heard Sajeeb’s voice. He really, truly does understand why Sajeeb left. He agrees, even. 

Sajeeb’s voice cracks him right down the middle.

“Hey, hi,” he says, words stumbling over each other to come out casually and he suspects coming out not casual at all. “What's up? Where are you?” 

“I'm in New York right now,” and Chris closes his eyes and can hear the city unfolding out through the speaker of his phone. Sajeeb must be on the street because he can hear traffic, voices he can't quite make into words. “Just left the airport.” 

“Where'd you come from?” he asks, eyes still closed. Sajeeb hums distractedly and it's familiar even through the crackle of the poor connection. 

“I was in Italy for a while,” Sajeeb says, and then he's telling Chris about the pillars and tattered remnant magics of ancient Greek ruins and the shiny imposing wards of the museums. He's excited and a little breathless with it, Chris can hear him move down the street in the change of the traffic and street hawkers offering things Chris can't make out. He leans back against the warm metal of the car door and listens. 

“Where are you?” Sajeeb asks at last. “How have you been?” 

Chris pauses, sighs through his nose. His voice is dry in his throat, a tickle like he's about to cry but his eyes are too dry. 

“Same as always. Good,” he murmurs at last. “I'm on a case right now.” 

Sajeeb makes a questioning noise. 

_I need you_ , he almost says, but that is the wrong thing to say and he bites it back, swallows down the bitter truth of it and looks for the right words. 

“It's a bad curse,” he says at last. “I don't know that I can handle it.”

Sajeeb is quiet. Breathing on the other end of the line, a rush of static, the connection decaying. Chris squeezes his eyes tighter shut, as tightly as he can, and lets starbursts of blindness go off behind his eyelids until it's almost like Sajeeb is breathing in his ear. 

“Chris,” Sajeeb says at last and Chris's heart doesn't break but it aches a little. 

“Yeah, I know,” he says, for something to say, and then opens his eyes. The house stares back at him. “Not about to let some bastard curse get the better of me.”

Sajeeb laughs at that, warm and a little surprised and quiet. it makes Chris smile even as his heart aches a little bit more. 

“I'll be sending thoughts,” Sajeeb promises and it doesn't heal the hurt dripping bitter and sad down the back of his throat but he does know it's true. He knows Sajeeb will be thinking of him, worrying, hoping he's alright. 

It's good. It's enough. 

“Make sure you eat something,” Sajeeb continues, warm and private. 

“I've eaten!” Chris insists and ignores the hollow rumble in his gut that makes him a liar. He can hear the smile on Sajeeb’s face even through the phone. 

“Eat again,” Sajeeb insists easily. “I have to catch a train, but be careful, Gavino.”

“I will,” Chris says and then the line is clicking over to dead air and his heart still isn't broken, hasn't cracked or faltered, but his chest feels raw anyway. “I miss you.”

* * *

He orders out because he can't fathom the energy to make food, but he does eat. It helps. He sleeps like the dead from the moment his head hits the pillow and if he dreams he doesn't remember it.

* * *

He’s rested when he gets to the office, but the burnout still lingers in the back of his head. It doesn’t worry him as much as it could. They’re not going to do any work with the curse, not really. Just test the waters of this layer, quick reconnaissance. Nothing serious. 

He just kind of wishes he had more sleep. 

He always remembers before, when he’s like this. He misses the rush of it sometimes. The roar of godhood settling around his shoulders, though he can only remember it in the way he remembers dreams; indistinct, imprecise, impossible and lovely. He could have broken this curse with a thought. 

The thoughts always turn to Sajeeb. They don't hurt anymore, not much, only in the way nostalgia hurts. In the way missing Sajeeb always hurts. 

Chris shakes it away and turns to the pile of notes in front of him. He can feel the cactus behind him in its special place on the windowsill, judging him. He flips it off without looking and immerses himself in the notes because cursing is still _very_ extremely illegal and he doesn't think punching the caster will break the curse faster but it'll make him feel better. 

He remembers the tightness of Momiji’s eyes, the way Harmony had spoken of sleeping, and he usually doesn't think there's much use for anger but he's been known to make exceptions. 

He's pretty sure he's got the orientation of the curse now, understands the metamagical design of it. Four cardinal directions and three floors, seven layers in total to tie the curse into the building and the location so intrinsically that he kind of suspects that trying to demolish the building would be like setting off a small bomb. The next layer will have an anchor in the ground floor, he's pretty sure. Maybe something elemental, though Chris doesn't really think so. 

No one is home when they pull up in the driveway. No one but the curse, brooding at the very edge of Chris's senses. 

“I don't like this,” Kevin says preemptively and Chris sighs through his nose and flicks the lock on his door back and forth until Kevin reaches across and slaps at his arm. 

“Well I don't know what other choices we have,” he says reasonably and slaps Kevin’s hand away to keep clicking the lock. 

“I don't have to like it,” Kevin says darkly and gets out of the car.

* * *

When he steps outside of himself the water of the second layer is gone, the pressing darkness of it absent from the corners of his eyes. Instead there is only stillness and a certain stifling kind of muffled silence as he steps outside of himself and looks around. 

The halls are lit with the sun and the emptiness of them is only emphasized by the way no sound seems to be able to penetrate it. All Chris can really feel is the tether between him and Kevin. 

It's foreboding. He ventures deeper anyway. 

It takes him longer than he likes to realize that the silence isn't as complete as he'd thought. There's a certain buzzing to it that comes and goes as he ventures deeper into the house. It fades when he nears the stairs at the center of the house, rattles loudest in the living room in front to of the big bay window. He circles the room a few times, chasing the volume of the hum. 

He realizes it’s the glass of the window on the third circuit, leaning in close enough to see that the light refracts through it just a little bit wrong. A little too diffuse, filtered prismatic and hitting the ground in rainbows that it shouldn’t, not through normal glass. 

The isn’t normal glass. It hums, low and a little unpleasant when he’s so close to it. A little oily-looking, like if he touched it his finger would slip across too easily. 

He reaches out to test the theory, to check the hum of glass, thoughtless and stupid. He's so tired, he hadn't let himself recharge long enough and it's making him reckless, the cloudy pulse of his thoughts ringing out a warning too late. 

A moment to cry out as it shatters out around him and pulls him in, tornado of glass like teeth and needles, a vanishing point he falls into-

It is a vast white space he falls into that he can't breathe in, heavy with silence and the smell of hot glass, he chokes trying to drag air into lungs he shouldn't logically have. He is still tied to Kevin, the connection stretching violently, tenuous at best but still echoing with Chris's scream. 

He realizes he is not alone. 

There is something vast and stark and blending perfectly with this white void, circling and circling him as he falls. There is a moment before it strikes that he realizes how deeply, deeply stupid of him it had been to touch that glass without precautions or at least looking a little while longer. 

It catches him in a grip like a python, clinching tighter and tighter and he doesn't really need to breathe in this space but it doesn't stop him from panicking. It's so constricting and this thing sits counter to his ability to see, too big and too immaterial, but there's the sensation of something either sharp or so cold that it burns where it's pressed against him. 

He thinks he's screaming, might be screaming through his body, but can't tell. The _thing_ , the guardian, only presses closer. 

For a bare second he's about to yank on the cord in a panicked scramble to bring himself out, out of this thing's needle fingers and winter mouth. But it's moving still, not a slow constriction, something purposeful. Chris realizes, sluggish with pain and incipient numbness that it's reaching down the thin tether of thought that's tying Chris to Kevin, to reality, to a way out. 

Chris can't get out without bringing this thing with him.

He can feel it trying to reach for Kevin too, shifting as it moves from a vast thing to something that can weasel in under Kevin's wards. Clinging vine. Something brutal, something with roots and strong stalks meant to insinuate and infiltrate and break foundations. It's growing for Kevin, reaching out to him and Chris-

_It shouldn't be able to do this,_ he thinks, but it's a useless thought because this thing is doing it anyway. 

Chris snaps the connection to Kevin. 

In the reverberating moment of the connection breaking he can feel Kevin crying out, trying to reach back to him, confusion and fear and determination before it all whites out and is gone. 

Like a wave the curse turns again, heavy and bending over him in absolute implacability. 

He realizes slowly, losing ground in his own head, that he is most likely going to die. 

He's lost the memory of his body already, giving up to the cold like poison, eating him away like acid. He has no fingers, no feet, no body or lungs except in the hollow impression of the pain that had torn him apart a moment ago. Everything is far away and awful and hopeless, if he could find his mouth he would scream with it but there's nothing left but the cold expanse of whiteness he falls into. 

It is awful, and impossible, and every part of him left rebels against it. 

He thinks of fire. 

Brilliant and beautiful and warm like every definition of home. He thinks of fire, of hearth fire and wild fire and the little spit of flame Sajeeb conjured in the cradle of a palm. He thinks of burning himself away in one last attempt to stop the curse. One last fuck you. One last glorious stand. Something to leave a mark. 

And then he thinks _no_ and he throws everything he has left into a ward that rings with defiance and Sajeeb’s name. 

The guardian recoils from the ward and the white space is gone as quickly as Chris had fallen into it. As he sinks down into the blessed dark the ward leaves him in he is still thinking Sajeeb’s name.

* * *

There is a warm hand in his when he swims far enough to the surface of the inner wall of his ward to feel the body beyond it. 

He is wounded, still. Diminished and hurting in a way that has nothing to do with his body and everything to do with the gouges like frostbite in the soft underbelly of his spirit. He is dumb with it, and frightened, but the hand in his is warm and familiar and he wants to open his eyes when he realizes he has eyes. 

Sajeeb is staring anxiously down at him, when he reaches a careful tendril beyond the dam of his ward to open his eyes. 

The ward breaks with the peal of a bell, the amniotic darkness beyond spilling back into his body so fast he wakes into something verging into a panic attack. Too fast, too soon, he hadn't eased back into his body right and-

Sajeeb’s arms are around him, he discovers when he finally pries his eyes back open. His nose is pressing to the side of Chris's neck and his breath is hot and fast and damp through the shoulder of his shirt. He realizes he's clinging to the back of Sajeeb’s shirt and his fingers hurt when he forces them to uncurl to press his palms flat to his back. 

He's warm. God, but he's so warm. 

“How did you,” he murmurs, delirious, voice a slurring wreck. 

Sajeeb is shaking, he discovers. Trembling under his hands. His own fingers are digging into the ridge of Chris's spine. 

“You called,” Sajeeb tells him, mouth moving against Chris's collar bone. “I heard my name.”

Chris remembers it. Remembers crying out for Sajeeb, a defiant war cry against the onslaught of something vast and awful and empty. He remembers that it had felt like a futile defence, he remembers that all he could hold onto had been fire and Sajeeb’s name. Synonymous, always. He remembers falling into the dark. 

He forces himself to drag air into his battered lungs. The air smells of Sajeeb: smoke and soap and clean man. 

“Romantic,” he croaks and Sajeeb chokes on a laugh that shakes them. “I think I need to sleep, like, right now maybe.” 

“I'll be here,” he hears as he passes out. “I'll be here.”


	2. it's just human nature

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to moliver for beta and to rosa for consultancy. my previous dedications apply just as much here, with the revision that i wrote 30k over my winter break and didn't get any sleep. leggo
> 
> enjoy xoxo

He wakes up in his own bed, in his own home, in his own sheets that smell of his laundry detergent, and for a minute or so he's so disoriented he has to turn over and press his face into his pillow and breathe slowly. 

There's another panic attack threatening in the pound of his heart in his chest and the way his lungs for a little while don't draw in enough air. It peters out eventually, fading into the way his hands shake and his heart is still just a little too fast. 

He's alone in the room but the piles of dirty laundry he's been ignoring to deal with after the job is finished have been bundled into his hamper and the curtains are drawn across to keep out the late morning sun. He's been tucked into bed, someone had even bothered to peel off his socks, and he can hear someone rattling around in his kitchen. 

_I'll be here_ , Sajeeb had told him, and he doesn't think Sajeeb has ever had it in himself to be cruel. 

His body feels weird and uncertain as he drags it out of bed but he keeps moving. It helps, the cold bathroom tile against the pads of his toes, the scratch of his nails against his scalp in massaging the shampoo in. New clothes, something that doesn't stink of fear-sweat and ugly magic. Meeting his own eyes in the mirror and recognizing the face looking back at him. 

It's only the next day, he discovers when he unearths his phone from the neat pile of belongings someone had stacked next to the bedroom door. Less than sixteen hours. He stares at the phone for a while, at the missed calls and text notifications, and drops it back onto the cushion of his discarded jacket. 

There's still noises coming from the kitchen. He shuffles to a stop in the doorway and stares. 

Sajeeb hasn't noticed him yet, poking cautiously at his coffee maker. There's sun streaming in the window around him and it's rosy and warm and beautiful. He's in loose sleep-rumpled clothes, hair a disaster, and there's a line pressed into his cheek from sleeping on the couch. 

It's achingly unfamiliar. Sajeeb has never been here before. He hasn't had Sajeeb in cotton pants and a shirt that leaves his collarbone bare, not in his kitchen, not _this_ kitchen. 

It's… it's domestic. It's almost but not quite what he had wanted and set aside because Sajeeb had been right, even if Chris hadn't liked it. 

“Have you considered asking it nicely?” he asks and Sajeeb jumps, a little hop and whirl to look at him that makes Chris croak out a laugh. His throat is sore. 

“You're up,” Sajeeb says redundantly, and shakes himself. He's flushing, hot across his cheekbones, and Chris can't stop running his gaze over the lines of his face. The quicksilver doesn't show him the details, doesn't show him how Sajeeb dresses or if the way he smiles has changed. Chris has only seen the essence of him, the fire under his skin. 

He doesn't look different, not really. His hair is longer, wild like he's just been forgetting to trim it. His pants look worn like they're well-loved, his shirt like it's secondhand. The way he watches Chris is the same, inscrutable and warm and with a lick of something deep in his pupils that looks like it would burn to touch. 

“Want coffee?” he asks cheerfully because he's still way too tired to care too much about if it's awkward. Sajeeb shrugs and nods and steps aside to let Chris at the coffeemaker. 

He sets it up in silence that's probably more awkward for Sajeeb than it is for him. Measuring out the grounds into the filter, checking the water in the reservoir. He reaches for his cinnamon, glances at Sajeeb who shrugs again mutely, and then puts a little in too. 

It hisses when he hits the switch and he turns to Sajeeb, who is still watching him. 

“Get mugs out for me?” he asks and points at the dishwasher, which he really hopes he'd remembered to run recently. 

They watch each other over their coffee after it's finished. 

“You jumped here,” Chris says softly. Sajeeb shrugs. Coffee sloshes in his mug. 

“I couldn't- You sounded-” he pauses, stares down into his mug. Chris stays quiet. He isn't sure he wants to know what he sounded like. He's pretty certain he'd been dying. 

“You didn't hear yourself,” Sajeeb says at last. “I had to come.”

“Well,” Chris says, because his throat has started aching like he's about to cry even though his eyes are so dry they kind of itch. “You fucking, you fucking folded spacetime to get to me, so. I think I should be thanking you.”

Sajeeb laughs like he doesn't want to. 

“Don't mention it,” he says, sounds strangled. “Like, really.”

Chris shrugs and drains his mug. There's a little niggling headache at his temples that's fading with the coffee, so he goes to pour more. 

He hates how awkward this is, just a little bit. More awkward than their transnational phone calls where neither of them can say what they want to, more awkward than being caught out watching Sajeeb through his quicksilver. Nothing like what he wants, nothing like the two of them had been. 

It's useless to think about. He shoves it away and drains half his fresh mug without turning. 

“You look good,” he says. Sajeeb is almost smiling when Chris looks back and that much is relieving, that he still knows what a Sajeeb that's amused despite himself looks like. 

“So do you,” Sajeeb says politely, even though Chris is well aware it isn't true. He looks like hell, hair all over the place and bags under his eyes that can't be pretty. He appreciates the sentiment anyway. 

“Cursebreaking treats me well,” he says, which also isn't true. 

Sajeeb nods diplomatically. Chris ignores it and thinks about making breakfast. The concept exhausts him but food would probably be a good idea and he’s fond of the concept of making the token effort where Sajeeb can see. He wonders if he can convince Sajeeb to make him pancakes. 

“You live alone?” Sajeeb asks as Chris goes to poke through the fridge and Chris snorts, prods at the eggs for a moment and realizes he has no idea if they’re expired. He closes the fridge door. 

“Pretty much. I can afford to,” he says and Sajeeb frowns. 

“You have two bedrooms,” he says, as if it's remotely relevant. Chris shrugs elaborately. The ‘second bedroom’ is a shitty futon with barely any padding and a lamp on the floor and probably some spiders. He hasn’t really been in there in months. Sajeeb obviously hadn't slept there. 

“For, you know, if people want to stay over,” he says. “I _can_ afford it.” 

“People,” Sajeeb says and it's got an edge to it that takes a moment to process. It takes a second and then Chris understands what he's saying in a burst of something that definitely isn't as angry as it should be, more amusement than annoyance. 

“I wasn't waiting for you,” Chris tells him. 

Sajeeb makes a rude little noise and Chris makes a noise right back, gesturing out at his cozy little apartment. 

“I wasn't!” he defends. “I have a job. I have friends!”

“You have _Kevin_ ,” Sajeeb counters, pretty rudely by Chris's estimation. 

“I have a cactus!” he insists and he's almost laughing as he does it, disbelieving, because Sajeeb is still here despite everything. He's still here, still watching Chris with his terrible little smile, still so bright inside it makes Chris's chest ache. 

Sajeeb laughs like he doesn't mean to, bright and shocked. “A cactus,” he echoes. Chris nods vigorously. 

“He's good,” he tells Sajeeb. His voice comes out more tender than he really likes. “You should come see him. You've never seen my office or anything, you asshole.”

There's a moment where Sajeeb just looks at him and something about his expression is as raw as Chris's chest feels. Raw and tender and hoping, hoping, hoping. 

“Sajeeb,” he says when the silence has become absolutely unbearable. 

Sajeeb looks down at his hands, turns them over in a gesture that's almost familiar. He hasn't conjured fire there but Chris remembers it, remembers golden fire licking over Sajeeb’s fingers, remembers it gilding the lines of his face into something rich and baroque. 

“Maybe,” he says, forbidding, turns away and Chris swallows down the bitterness of coffee and coriander.

* * *

Sajeeb is still asleep when Chris wakes up the next morning, the door to his spare bedroom shut tight and forbidding between them. Chris thinks about waking him, imagines Sajeeb’s face soft with sleep and confusion, and decides against it. Nothing good would come of forcing Sajeeb to come with him. 

He leaves a note on the counter though. The address of the office and a smiley face because he's a little bit weak when it comes right down to it. He tapes it to the coffeemaker where he knows Sajeeb will stumble over and see it as soon as he wakes up and locks the door behind him.

* * *

The ride on the train is less crowded than it could be and the person that had been putting down roots two weeks ago isn't there anymore. Chris takes their seat and leans his head against the metal of the side of the train car and dozes.

* * *

Kevin looks up hopefully when Chris pushes the door open and steps in. 

Chris ignores the way his face falls when he realizes Chris is alone, concentrates on hanging up his jacket instead. He doesn't want to think about how the disappointment is licking up the back of his throat. It still tastes like sour coffee. 

“Not a word,” he warns, because he doesn't have it in him to deal with Kevin's righteous fury on his behalf. Not today. Not like this. Kevin nods anyway, and his expression is sad and soft instead of angry. 

“Yeah, of course,” he murmurs and turns away to grab the box of notes, allowing Chris the time to compose himself. Chris is grateful. 

They don't have a shortage of notes to go over in any case. Chris spends an hour telling Kevin everything that the curse had felt like, everything about the shape of the guardian. The overwhelming size of it, the bitterness of the white cold. The humming of glass, how he isn't sure if it's the glass itself that's the anchor or the anchor is somehow projecting through it. 

It's cruel, whatever it is. Something meant to obstruct clarity of vision, but it seems meant more to trap a cursebreaker than to hurt inhabitants. 

Chris doesn't think about what could have happened. He's always been very good at that. 

“We do some careful reconnaissance,” he's saying, prodding dubiously at the stack of reference materials on glass magic Kevin is piling up for them to look through. “No touching windows, obviously-” 

The wards ring out the jarringly cheerful chime that means someone is standing at the door and Chris jumps about a mile. Kevin has to throw a hand over the pile of books to keep it from toppling to the floor. 

“Who the fuck,” he asks, mystified, and Chris shrugs and follows him when he goes to investigate. 

It's Sajeeb. 

A tray of takeout coffee in one hand and the other tucked awkwardly into his scarf like he isn't sure if he should be unwinding it or not. He almost looks like he fits here against the backdrop of bromeliad leaves and midmorning sun, smiling uncertainly. There are circles under his eyes but they're faint, and there's a hopeful little smile tucked into his mouth. Chris can't breathe. 

Sajeeb looks at the papers in Chris's hands and nods once, unties his scarf and leaves it hanging around his neck. 

“I brought coffees,” he mumbles. He's flushing under their combined stares. 

“Give,” Kevin demands, voice on the cold side, and strides past Chris to snatch them. He gives Chris a look as he passes, searching and less reproachful than Chris was expecting. Whatever he sees, he nods and keeps going. 

They're left in the entrance hall, the door hanging open behind Sajeeb. Chris still can't look away from him, standing so uncomfortable and quiet with his empty hands and his scarf hanging from his neck. 

“Reconsidered on the cactus viewing?” he asks because he can't help himself. 

Sajeeb grins, looks a little grateful. 

“Couldn't miss it,” he agrees softly.

* * *

Sajeeb examines the cactus with care that doesn't make a damn bit of sense but makes the back of Chris's throat ache tight and bitter. 

He wonders how the cactus feels, picked up and moved around for the first time since Kevin had walked it into Chris's office on the accusation that Chris had no sense of decor. He thinks it probably likes Sajeeb; it's hard not to, and his magic has always been more warm and bright than Chris's. 

“It seems happy,” Sajeeb says, and Chris knows he doesn’t talk to plants like Kevin does but he’s better with them than Chris is. He believes him. 

He leans back against his desk and looks around his office, trying to see what Sajeeb would see. Stacks of reference books, a framed certificate for a meaningless certification some agency had handed him because saving the world apparently gave him _qualifications_. A cabinet of bottles and dried herbs and artifacts not arranged nearly well enough. File cabinet after file cabinet of case notes and old contact information. 

The cactus. 

“Did you name it?” Sajeeb asks and Chris looks back at him. He’s settling the cactus carefully back in its optimal spot on the windowsill, mindful of the spines. 

“Kevin says if it wants a name it’ll say so,” Chris says primly and Sajeeb laughs, turns to lean against the wall opposite and look at Chris. 

It’s Chris’s office, his home ground, as much his as his apartment if not more so. He’s bled and sweat and cried for this place, for the work he does that he _does_ love, can’t imagine not loving. He still feels weak, powerless, so small in the face of the unknown of Sajeeb. 

“This is where you work,” Sajeeb says, which is stupid enough that Chris doesn’t treat it as a question. 

“Most of the work is in the field,” he corrects and gestures around. “This is where I keep my goodies and loot, y’know.” 

Sajeeb eyes the moose skull that takes up the whole bottom shelf of Chris’s cabinet of things he can’t put in file cabinets. He looks a little more certain when he looks back at Chris, like something in him has been decided. 

“You'll just go after the curse on your own again if I don't stick around,” he says softly. It’s not a question except in the way it is. Chris feels it in his chest. 

“I am known for being occasionally reckless,” he agrees and he's breathless for some reason. His heart is beating like a bass drum through his wrists and the base of his throat. 

_Stay_ , it says.

* * *

The fourth layer is anchored in the window, Chris figures out that much after pacing the uneven circle of the first floor for an hour. 

Glass is difficult. Tricky to look at directly even when it’s just normal glass. It’s almost impossible to get a good look at when it’s spelled like this, tempered in magic to turn his eyes away, distract his attention, tempt him into stupid decisions. It‘s worse that he can’t touch it, can’t really bring himself to touch _any_ of it in the whole house yet. 

He grits his teeth and squints against it and does more circles. He can beat a spell. He’s more powerful and much more tricky. 

The migraine sets in sometime in the late afternoon, the sun coming in low through the windows and making everything easier to see but harder on his eyes. He ignores the low ache in the back of the sockets and steps outside himself to look again, ignores the spots in his vision when he steps back into his body and blinks. 

Sajeeb stops him at last, when he tries to stand up from his last time projecting and has to lean against the wall. He can barely see and it’s starting to burn when he blinks and sound is echoing weirdly, reverberating in his skull all wrong. 

“There’s an anchor,” Chris says, because he can’t see it very well but he can sense the lecture building on Sajeeb’s lips and he’s not interested in hearing it. “It’s, I'm pretty sure it’s the window.” 

Sajeeb is quiet for a little while, guiding him down the hallway to the front door. Chris sags shamelessly against his grip. The headache isn’t getting any better. It is, in fact, getting worse. 

“Do you think just smashing it will work?” he asks quietly and Chris shrugs and winces when it just makes the ache flare in his head. 

“Maybe,” he says. His voice is hoarse. He hasn’t been drinking water all day, he thinks absently. He wonders if Kevin thought to squirrel some water bottles away somewhere. “I’d want to be sure. A ritual cleansing, maybe.” 

“We’ll talk about it later,” Sajeeb says and he’s leaning Chris against the side of the car. It’s warm from the sun. Chris keeps his eyes shut and leans his temple against it and hopes the world stops spinning soon.

* * *

They can’t really break the window without alerting the coven so Kevin shoots off a quick email and waits for a response. 

Chris spends the time waiting for permission to smash out the cursed glass mixing up the purification bath. Sea salt, poured by the cupful into the gallon jugs. Sage next in big handfuls, and a clockwise turn of the water, his hand hovering over the surface to test it. Sajeeb helps, ferrying the buckets around for him and loading the treated water into the trunk of Kevin’s car without complaint. 

They get permission in an hour, assurance they’ll have someone come by to cover the hole where their cursed window had been. Kevin grins down at his phone and Chris leans across to look and snorts at the dancing gif attached to the email. It's from Victoria. 

“Go time,” Kevin says with quiet intensity and totally deserves the mockery Chris heaps on him in the car.

* * *

Kevin puts a rock through the window. 

Chris catches the pieces as they fall, straining after every glittering piece of dust, every shred of magic he can. The rest of the glass he pops out of the frame, groping after it blindly, holding himself steady even though the touch of this magic against his is repulsive. It’s clawing back at him as he hovers it over the line of their salt circle to the purification bath, a broad slash of his arm holding it in the air and then bringing his palm down to lower it. Kevin skitters back as he does. 

The glass hisses as it hits the water like it should be putting off steam, a scream as it hits the purification and sinks in. 

The guardian dies without a sound. Chris feels it throb around him like a dying heartbeat and then still, pressure popping in his eardrums, and he has a moment to realize how _stupid_ he’d been again, only throwing down a salt circle. 

It blows through the salt with a sizzle, slams against his ward and shatters through. 

This, this isn't the guardian. It's bigger, impossibly bigger, bigger and heavier and more evil. It's the curse unloading again, a wave of backlash, and he should have been ready but he isn’t. It’s too big, so much bigger than he was expecting, orders of magnitude bigger. 

For a time he’s adrift in it, battling to keep it from touching him and then just fighting not to drown in it, not to be washed out of himself and disappear under the waves of choking misery. It’s overwhelming and too much like before, emptiness all around him, sinking into it and it sinking into him. He’s losing his sense for his body again-

Sajeeb’s hand finds his shoulder and then he is filling up with gold and light. 

It's fire and he can taste it like cinnamon on the back of his tongue, Sajeeb pouring power into him reckless and warm and glorious, filling him up until the edges of himself are solid again. He’s luminous to his own skewed vision, Sajeeb behind him flaring like a torch, borrowed fire in his own skin. 

He finds his feet against the ground and braces himself. 

_motherfucker fucking come at me,_ he thinks incoherently and clenches his fist and pushes back. 

The curse fades against Sajeeb’s fire like morning dew, melting back and away until Chris can breathe again, until he can’t find even a trace of it left. Until the layer breaks without noise or fanfare, just a clear ringing feeling in his chest and the sunlight suddenly so much warmer through the windows. 

“Jesus,” Sajeeb says and there’s a thump that has Chris turning. 

He’s propped himself up against the wall, eyes closed, worryingly limp. He doesn’t open his eyes when Chris stumbles over. He doesn’t really move at all, just tilts his head at Chris and flaps a hand. 

“That was draining,” he says and Chris nods mutely. He can feel it himself, the wavering grey rings of his burned reserves at the edges of his vision. He’s barely more steady on his feet than Sajeeb, more experience than any real energy left. 

“It sucks dong,” he says, more sympathetic than he wants to be. “Let’s get to the car.” 

“What are you gonna do,” Sajeeb asks and his eyes crack open at last, glittering slits and a halfway smile at Chris. “Carry me? 

Chris grins. He’s starting to sway a little and he’d like to sit down. 

“ _Kevin!_ ” he shouts.

* * *

Kevin refuses to carry either of them but he does laugh at them leaning on each other and hobbling to the car, which Chris bears with silent dignity. It’s nice anyway, shrugging away the curse with difficulty, heaving Sajeeb into the backseat and toppling into the passenger side. Kevin laughs at them some more but he makes sure their seatbelts are buckled before he gets them rolling and Chris does love him a little bit. 

He doesn’t fall asleep on the way home. He watches the parabola dip of the power lines, the pooling deja vu of the streetlights, and listens to Sajeeb snore and Kevin hum tunelessly. He almost doesn’t recognize when they reach the city, lulled into a trance, jerking to awareness only when the car jolts to a stop with Kevin’s whispered apology. 

Sajeeb wakes up when Chris reaches in to shake him, jolting and clutching at Chris’s arm before settling into wakefulness with a resentful mutter. He follows when Chris tugs him upright, placid and docile stumbling out of the car and flapping a hand in response to Kevin’s goodnight. 

He doesn’t really wake up any more, a warm hand finding Chris’s shoulder and then leaning against him easily, weight he can barely balance in his own daze but does his best to guide up the stairs. By the top of the stairs Sajeeb has to balance him as Chris maneuvers his key into the lock, his own exhaustion rallying over him all at once. 

He follows Chris to his bedroom. 

Sajeeb looks so tired, he thinks distantly. There are circles under his eyes, a weight bowing his shoulders invisible to Chris but still tangible. He looks like he wants to say something, like he _wants_ something. 

He’d drained himself as much as Chris had, in fighting off the curse. Maybe worse, because he can’t be used to it like Chris is. Inured to the awful dragging void of running out of magic to burn. It hurts a little to look at. It hurts worse to feel, Chris knows it better than maybe anyone, the cold bruised hurting in the chest that aches for touch and rest. 

“The guest bed sucks,” he says baldly. “You want to. Just sleep here, Jesus, you look like you're about to pass out.” 

Sajeeb looks at him, really looks at him. 

“Okay,” he says at last, quiet and small. He settles under the covers like he can't help himself, like he can't hold onto the tension in his spine or even consciousness. He's asleep by the time Chris has trekked to the bathroom and back for water, eyelashes dark against his cheeks. 

Chris has a big enough bed for them to sleep without touching and he keeps to his side, glances at Sajeeb to make sure he really is asleep before turning off the light. He can still kind of feel Sajeeb putting out heat like a furnace as he lets exhaustion drag him under. That much is familiar.

* * *

He gets up first and thinks guiltily about how Sajeeb had looked, tucked up in his blankets. 

Not like much, if he’s honest. The blanket pulled up so far over his head that all he could really see was the tangle of his hair across the pillow and the mounded shape of him, shoulder and hip and the dip of waist. 

He pushes the thought away and busies himself gathering all the notes he’d taken home that he really shouldn’t have, putting them on the table to take back to the office. 

Sajeeb shuffles out a while later, hair wet and tied back to gather at the nape of his neck. He looks less tired than he had, his cheekbones a little less sharp against his skin, the way he moves less like fouled machinery. He heads straight to the coffeemaker, nods to Chris, and something nervous in Chris’s chest settles. 

“I feel like I got hit by a truck,” Sajeeb tells him and his voice is rough with sleep and sweet with irony. 

“Happens,” Chris says and reaches across him to boggart the mug out of Sajeeb’s hands. “Sucks, but y’know.” 

Sajeeb doesn’t try to take the mug back, just reaches for a clean cup and starts pouring again. 

“You could just bring in someone official, I know the city probably has a curse diffusion squad,” he says quietly. 

The thought catches Chris in the gut like a punch and he’s left grasping after the reasons why because he doesn’t… he doesn’t understand it. They could, they could call in the big guns with their multi-witch units and industrial purity rituals. Salting and burning and leaving clean ground behind whatever the cost. They probably should because this curse has already nearly killed him once and it’ll try again, it’ll try to kill all of them. 

They should. He hates the thought. 

“They would just,” he says weakly, “take the case away.”

Sajeeb frowns. 

“Maybe they should.”

“I can beat this thing,” Chris snaps back and he can’t help himself, he can’t stop the anger and pride and something else, something that echoes with deja vu, something from before when the stakes had been higher, even more dangerous. 

_I can do this. I have to do this._

He knows Sajeeb knows it as he looks at him. He doesn’t want to talk about it. 

Sajeeb sighs from deep in his chest, heavy and slow and weighty. 

“We can,” he affirms, unwilling. “ _We_ can.”

* * *

They're packing up, getting ready to head back to the house for even more exploratory work. Sajeeb is still uncertain, barred from visiting the house again until Chris is certain he's rested, watching them ferrying boxes and sheafs of paper back and forth until Chris takes pity on him and hands him his travel mug to fill from the pot in the workroom. 

He still stands there awkwardly but Chris stops by to steal sips and hand the mug back and it seems to keep him from jittering too hard. 

Chris flips the keys to Kevin when the piles of nominally useless reference papers have all been shifted. Sajeeb watches over the sip he's stealing from Chris's mug. 

“Why are you always the driver?” he asks before Chris can say anything and Chris grimaces as Kevin laughs. Sajeeb looks back and forth between them in confusion. 

“Chris can't drive,” Kevin says gleefully and Chris's scowl intensifies. 

“I can so,” he argues, because he _can_ , technically speaking. Kevin grins at him and he turns away to shuffle his notes in irritation. 

“He doesn't have a license,” Kevin supplies helpfully. Chris refuses to look at him. 

“Why not?” Sajeeb asks and Chris knows he's looking at his back, can feel the burn of eyes between his shoulder blades. He knows Sajeeb is remembering that he hadn't always really cared about that, about little pieces of plastic and laminate that dictated what he could and couldn't do. 

He's grown up a little, he likes to think. 

“I get too, you know, fucked up after jobs,” he says grumpily. “Can't drive and I don't know, I just don't.” 

There had been one night, one curse. Kevin drowning on thin air, choking up briney seawater by the lungfull, convulsing on a cold tile floor. Chris sobbing and tearing at the curse with hands and teeth and raw magic, and Christ, it had been a fucking miracle that either of them had survived. 

He remembers that panicked drive to get Kevin to the hospital sometimes, late at night. Ugly dreams of plastic steering wheel pinching the skin of his palms and Kevin's rattling wet breathing. They'd made it, which is all Chris will allow to matter. 

“He's just lazy,” Kevin says and Chris turns to throw a stack of paper. 

Kevin doesn't catch all of it and Chris walks away to the delightful sound of Kevin cursing him out and Sajeeb’s laughter. 

“At least I'm not on research duty,” Chris throws loudly over his shoulder and Sajeeb groans.

* * *

He stands in the hallway running the length of the house, the main artery of the space, breathes in deep and stands up out of himself. 

He makes the rookie mistake of looking down and there's a sense of nausea for a moment, a swaying in his vision at being able to see the back of his own head, but he turns and waits for the ghost of where his stomach isn't to settle. It's easy enough to look around without moving anyway. 

There's nothing. Quiet sunlit hallway and the glimpses of the rooms opening off it. The soft whisper of Kevin's magic like wind in leaves. He pivots past them all, slips between his body and Kevin without looking at himself too closely and picks his way towards the stairs. 

And freezes. 

There's something wrong with his vision, something wrong with the way the walls fit together. Something that fights back when he squints at it. Something etching itself into his head, incisive, impossible. 

There are layers to it, he realizes, fighting past the blunt headache to look. Layers of shifting unreality, layers slightly off from each other, set just counter enough to make him dizzy and sick and uncertain. 

It _hurts_ to look at and he fights the instinct to catapult himself away from it, away from the seething wrongness of what he’s seeing. It hurts like needles through the backs of his eye sockets, fading to a dull throb and an acidic anxiety as he looks longer. 

He forces himself to stay. He swallows against the ghostly sensation of bile in the back of a throat he doesn’t have right now, and looks. 

There’s a path, he sees eventually. It’s hard, it’s like picking a lock in a hurricane, but he spots it eventually. In the roiling mess of it all, there’s a way through. He can’t see it well but it’s there, a gleam of solid ground in the midst of the illusion and trap. 

He turns and jolts, a shiver of psychic unease because somehow the _wrongness_ has spread like a disease, bleeding around him, threads of it running across the floor and walls, circling him like a trap. 

It doesn’t move when he makes a panicked dash back to his body. 

He catapults back out, ricochets back into his body with a force that snaps the air like a whipcrack and sends his body ragdolling backwards across the floor. Kevin cries out in shock but his heartbeat is overwhelmingly loud and almost everything Chris can hear. It takes him a moment to get his thrashing convulsions under control but he manages eventually, splayed out limp and sweaty on the hardwood. 

There’s none of the wrongness, out here. It hadn’t followed him. If it had been a trap, it hadn’t sprung on him. 

“What the shit,” Kevin demands, leaning into Chris field of vision. 

Chris makes a grotesque noise and then coughs, clears his throat, and tries again. 

“What's up, gamers,” he croaks and Kevin rolls his eyes and disappears again. 

“I'm fine, thanks!” he calls after Kevin, voice rough and laughter rougher. 

“I'm telling Sajeeb!” Kevin's voice floats back to him and Chris frowns. His body aches but he forces it upright anyway, drags the back of his hand across his mouth and peers after Kevin. He isn't seeing totally clearly yet but he's pretty sure Kevin left the room. 

“You wouldn't,” he calls after Kevin, and then when he gets no answer, “Kevin? You're not calling him right?” 

“Hey, yeah,” he hears, “You won't believe what the idiot did.” 

“ _Kevin,_ ” he barks and lunges to his feet.

* * *

Sajeeb doesn’t say anything when they get back to the office but he does look at Chris with poignant disappointment, which is worse. 

Chris shuffles around to hide unobtrusively behind Kevin until Sajeeb stops looking. It helps that Kevin is starting to stack up reference material like it’s a compulsion. There’s a lot of it because neither of them really know how to deal with this, haven’t really seen anything like it before. 

Sajeeb removes his baleful disappointment from Chris’s hiding place to the pile of books, facing them with a distrust that makes Chris want to snigger. He keeps quiet to avoid drawing attention to himself. 

“Research?” he asks and he makes it sound like a dirty word. Kevin grins a little nastily. 

“Research,” he confirms. “Chris doesn't get to go in blind.”

Chris rolls his eyes and edges cautiously into Sajeeb’s line of sight. When Sajeeb doesn't immediately start lecturing he reaches out to snag the top book. It's a heavy grimoire bound in soft leather, at least a century old. It's never been particularly helpful but Chris has his hopes it will be eventually. 

“I have no idea what I'm dealing with,” he agrees. “I wanna have at least like, a game plan.”

“A- _maze_ -ing,” Kevin sing-songs and Chris groans and grabs a piece of chalk to throw at him 

“It’s not a maze,” he points out. “It’s a perspective puzzle, don’t be a douche.” 

“You’re about a week late on that one,” Sajeeb agrees easily and Chris watches Kevin glance at him and visibly swallow back the sharp comment he’s sure leapt into his head. It’s progress.

* * *

“You might need to be my anchor,” Chris says, rubbing his thumb over the corner of the worktop. He senses the moment Sajeeb looks at him. “Not this time I don’t think, but at some point.” 

“You think so?” Sajeeb asks and he sounds surprised. Chris snorts at him. 

“As godly powerful as I truly am,” he drawls. “Sometimes shit happens and I’d like some backup in case I, you know, nearly die again.” 

Sajeeb grimaces. 

“I see your point,” he says, strained. 

“So tell me what you know about projecting around curses,” Chris says, tries to school himself into seriousness. Sajeeb looks at him suspiciously for a long moment and then sits gingerly on the stool across from Chris, puts his elbows on the worktable. 

“Just anything you know,” Chris prompts and Sajeeb rolls his eyes. 

“You need to anchor yourself,” he says authoritatively, just a hint of rote to his words like he’s reciting off a pamphlet. Chris eyes him suspiciously for a moment. 

“Did you read the wikihow article on cursebreaking?” he demands and then hoots with delight when Sajeeb’s cheeks darken tellingly. “You _did_ , oh my _god_.”

“Shut up,” Sajeeb says petulantly. He won’t meet Chris’s eyes. 

“I will literally never,” Chris chokes out. “Oh my god.” 

“I wanted to have an idea of what I was doing!” Sajeeb snaps. Chris bends double, has to plant his hands on his knees to keep himself from falling over with how hard he’s laughing. 

“Jesus,” he wheezes at last, hauling himself back upright. “Christ, oh my god. You have so much to learn.” 

“You have Kevin,” Sajeeb says dubiously. Chris grins at him. 

“Kevin is a great anchor,” he says. “Trust me. But you gotta make yourself useful, so-”

* * *

“What am I supposed to be doing?” Sajeeb asks and Chris pauses in packing his bag. “When I'm with you.”

Chris blinks at him owlishly. He'd been concentrating and it's hard to shift focus, nearly impossible to drag his thoughts from the curse layer he can feel niggling at him like a sore tooth. 

“I can't see like you can and Kevin is your anchor, there's nothing I can really help with,” he clarifies and Chris squints at him for another moment before turning back to what he'd been doing. 

“Stay back by my body and make sure nothing attacks me,” Chris says absently. He’s not even looking at Sajeeb as he says it, sorting through his bottles of oils and herbs mechanically. He’s not even paying attention to what he’s doing until Sajeeb’s hand is on his wrist and halting his movement. 

“Is that going to happen?” he demands and he sounds- 

He sounds worried. 

He doesn’t flinch when Chris puts his hand over his, just stares, riveted and blank. His hand is gentle but he hesitates when he lets go like he doesn’t want to. It leaves a rush of pins and needles in its wake, his skin picked out against Chris’s in something not quite magic. 

“Probably not,” he says quietly, reassuring. Sajeeb meets his eyes for a long time before he nods and looks down. 

“Alright,” Sajeeb says, and there’s fire in his eyes when he lifts them to Chris again. “Yeah, no one’s gonna touch you. I got this.” 

“My hero,” Chris assures him and pats his hand busily until Sajeeb laughs and pushes him to get him to stop.

* * *

Victoria is waiting for them in the driveway. 

“I just wanted to check up on the house,” she says cheerfully. 

“We're not going to knock any more holes in your house without warning you,” Chris tells her and she grins, unrepentant. 

“Oh, you know,” she says airily and waves a hand. “Don't mind me at all.” 

She's polite in pushing past them into the house at least. Chris politely doesn't notice when she wobbles for a moment in the doorway before her back tightens and her magic snaps shut like steel and she walks on. He's almost used to it, the weight of malignant weight pressing down on the air inside. It's more obvious now, stripped of its outer layers and clever defenses. 

“We're clearing a layer today,” he tells her as she makes a show of looking around the house. There's no sign of tension in her and he admires that, the ease of her bearing. She can't have the tightness to her wards that's keeping the curse out of his head. 

“I'll be out of your hair soon,” she tells him and then she's gone in the time it takes him to haul the seating pads out of the car. 

He barely notices her going. He's steeling himself, trying to center himself against the crush of the alien, evil unreality he's about to try to navigate. It’s centering himself and then centering himself again in his sense of the house, trying to be certain of his feet on the ground and the distance between them and what that means. 

He breathes out, nods to Kevin, and steps outside of himself. 

This time there is no pause before the wrongness is around him in a seething whirlpool, a poisonous eddy. He swallows and stands absolutely still until the urge to curl up in a ball and cover his eyes until the wrongness goes away subsides. 

It takes a long time and vertigo still surges through him in uneven waves. No pattern to become accustomed to. 

He pushes himself into motion anyway. He can’t stay here, can’t stare into this curse until he goes mad. He has better things to do. 

For a while he wobbles and the world wobbles with it, the skew of his vision swinging in and out of tune with the puzzle. It drags more vertigo from him, panicky and nauseating, and he swallows bitterly against it and forces himself to steady. 

It would be easy to drive himself mad, like this. To lose himself in turning and turning and trying to see when there’s nothing there. It would be easy, it’s what the curse is designed to do, but he squints and forces himself forward another step. 

It doesn’t get easier, not precisely, but he falls into the rhythm of it. There’s a headache building in him at the other end of his tether but it’s distant, he barely notices it. 

He puts a foot forward. Finds the solid ground, sorting through the layers of his vision to find the real floor and sets his foot on it, settles his weight and lifts the other. Slow, immeasurably slow. 

It takes a turn down the hall and he almost doesn't notice in time, has to drag his foot back to solid ground and try to balance against the surging of vertigo, the spin of the world in his vision. 

He turns, sets his foot carefully down on solid ground, and keeps going. 

The world is spinning faster as he goes, swirling in the corners of his eyes. The blank walls don't help, the flat beige planes difficult to pick out details to cling to. 

There's another turn down the hall, a slanting path that jukes hard to the right before turning left into the main bedroom. It's a big room, lined with windows that don't make it as easy as they could because he has to follow a spiral path around the room, turning in widdershins towards the middle of the room. 

He's left in the middle of the floor eventually, no more solid ground in sight. There's barely any sense for Kevin, he can't hear anything but the ambient noise of the magic around him. It's bad reception, a bad connection. He has nowhere to go but back along the treacherous path he'd come down. 

He deliberates for a long moment. He could have missed the right path but he doubts it, he'd followed it too carefully, strained his sight too much to have missed it. He's missing _something_. 

_oh,_ he thinks and then turns to face South, directly through the wide span of a window. 

The layer shatters around him with a shiver and the realignment of reality with his vision and then he’s being dropped back into his body faster than he’d expected, faster than is safe. 

It’s not a seizure, this time. It’s more of a spiritual tazing. 

Eventually he becomes aware of hands on him, gentle in tugging his fingers away from his face, someone’s arm around him keeping him anchored. His whole body hurts and when he realizes that he realizes he’s holding himself so tense his teeth creak against each other, and he lets go of it all at once. 

It hurts very badly for a moment, and then the pain starts to fade. He’s left sweat-wet, limp and trembling in intermittent spasms. 

His eyes are closed. He has all his fingers and toes and he knows where they are, thinks given a little while and some gathered energy he could move them. He actually fits under his skin pretty well he realizes, which is a fucking miracle, and then Sajeeb shifts behind him and he realizes he’s tucked under Sajeeb’s chin. He’s on his side on the uncomfortable wooden floor, being spooned by Sajeeb. 

“I’m good,” he says, only it comes out a garbled mass of syllables. He tries to open his eyes and immediately squints them mostly shut against the assault of the light. It’s too much. 

There’s a little smear of wetness on his cheek where he’s drooled on himself, he discovers miserably. At least he hadn’t _shat_ himself. 

“He’s okay,” Kevin says quietly. He’s somewhere nearby. Sajeeb shifts, vertigo waterfalling through Chris’s gut for a moment. “Danger’s passed. Just give him a little while.” 

“Kay,” Sajeeb mumbles. He doesn’t let go of Chris. Chris squeezes his eyes shut again and lets his consciousness relax back into fitful dozing.

* * *

“Does that happen a lot?” Sajeeb asks.

Chris shrugs. It’s clumsy motion. He’s buckled into the back with Sajeeb just in case he seizes again, or some part of himself comes undone somehow and he needs someone to dive in after him immediately. It’s unlikely, but Sajeeb had set his jaw and stared until Kevin had shrugged. Chris hadn’t bothered arguing at all. 

“No,” Kevin says grimly from the driver’s seat. “It’s pretty rare and that was pretty bad.” 

“It’s been worse,” Chris slurs argumentatively. Kevin glares at him in the rearview mirror and Chris subsides. 

“Usually we’re not five layers deep in a curse that’s nearly killed you once already,” he snaps back, and Chris can’t meet his eyes. Silence falls over the car, heavy and unpleasant. 

“He’s worried about you,” Sajeeb says quietly, and his hand finds Chris’s arm. Warm, reassuring weight. 

Chris glances up at Kevin because he can’t stand looking at Sajeeb, not when he sounds like that. He isn’t looking back, looking at Sajeeb in the rearview mirror instead, expression on his face evaluating. 

“I know,” he mumbles and Kevin looks back at him, a flicker of eyes before he’s looking back at the road. 

“I don’t like when you do shit like that,” he says after a moment, tone fussy and utterly sincere. “I don’t like seeing you like that, dude.” 

“Love you too, Kev,” Chris tells him, makes sure to slur it badly, and laughs when Kevin flips him off with relief in his chest.

* * *

Sajeeb corrals him away from the door when he moves to leave the next morning, tells him it's on Kevin's orders, and stares him down until he takes a seat on the couch. 

He makes pancakes while Chris fidgets and complains about being useless and enjoys himself thoroughly. They're delicious, heavy with butter, leave him warm and sleepy. He's still so tired. So tired it's difficult to see where the line is, subtle and important between the way they are and what he's never truly stopped wanting. 

They end up on the couch, television on something neither of them really care about. Sajeeb is dozing and Chris isn't watching him at all. 

“Travel stories,” he says eventually and Sajeeb jolts like he's been shocked. 

“...What?” he asks when he's managed to clear the ungainly squawk from his throat. Chris jabs him with an elbow. 

“Travel stories,” he repeats, “I wanna hear some.”

Sajeeb stares at him like he's speaking French. He grins into the face of it until Sajeeb blinks and looks down at his hands. 

“I guess?” he answers uncertainly. “If you want to hear about just like, museums.” 

“Sure,” Chris says and shoves his feet into Sajeeb’s lap. He studiously ignores Sajeeb looking at him until a warm hand drops to circle his ankle. It's dry and rough and his thumb is rubbing slow circles into the bone of his ankle. It's imminently distracting. 

Sajeeb starts a stuttering story, something about getting tackled by a security guard at the Louvre that hadn't been warned that he'd be there to test the wards. A few minutes in his voice smoothes out, transitions into describing the art he'd seen, the ruins he'd explored in his free time. Chris can almost see it, closes his eyes and imagines the broken teeth of pillars, the shine of winter sunlight off Russian ice. 

“Did you find yourself?” Chris asks idly, interrupting the flow of Sajeeb describing the tiny government building in the Phillipines he'd nearly fallen off the roof of in the course of testing the security. He's almost mocking but mostly wistful. 

He's thinking again of the memories Sajeeb has without him. Sometimes he wishes he could reach out and steal them from Sajeeb, just for a little while, just long enough to see what they are. Not jealousy exactly. Something Chris doesn't have the words for. 

Sajeeb looks at him like he understands what he's thinking. Like he maybe feels a little the same. 

“I think I did,” he affirms, a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth to answer Chris's teasing. 

“And?” Chris asks. “Who _is_ the real Sajeeb Saha?”

“Me, dick,” Sajeeb says and he's definitely laughing now. “But I think I can be, you know, happy with that.”

Abruptly Chris can't breathe. 

“Good,” he says with the last of his air. It’s something about the smile on Sajeeb’s face, something about Sajeeb and happiness. He’s always wanted Sajeeb happy.

* * *

When he's finally allowed back to the house Chris drags their entire setup upstairs without even bothering with a cursory dip into his sight. 

The whole thing is patterns. Patterns in concentric rings, tighter and deeper and nastier with every one. Four cardinal directions and three floors, just like Chris had thought weeks ago. This one is the third floor; he can feel it. 

It's pressure, like being underwater. All over and a tightness in his eyes. He pushes the sensation away; it isn't real and doesn't matter. 

He knows Kevin can feel it. He's tense around the eyes, deep lines carved around his mouth years of friendship tell Chris how to look for. Sajeeb is just as easy to read. He looks tired, slow in carrying equipment up the stairs, a certain way he has of looking at the floor. 

He leaves it be. There's nothing he can do but power through. 

They get the pads arranged, a salt circle set up, and all of them settle into place quietly. Chris barely has to nod to Kevin before he's closing his eyes and centering himself. 

Chris opens his eyes and swears. 

His first instinct is to throw himself right back into his body but he pauses for a moment, edges down the hallways and examines it as he goes. It's hard to move through but he stays just long enough to make sure and then tugs at Kevin to bring him back. 

Kevin is frowning at him as he opens his eyes, obviously concerned by how quickly he'd come back up. Sajeeb is watching too, expression a little more impassive and eyes gleaming worriedly. Chris waves a hand to show he's fine. 

He'd barely been down for ten minutes. He still feels disoriented, body confused by his return. 

When he feels a little steadier he looks back over his shoulder down the hallway. It looks empty like this. No sign of the choking vines he'd had to avoid. 

He thinks of all of them walking up and down the hallways, of the vines looping tighter and tighter around Kevin’s throat, draping Sajeeb’s shoulders until they start to bow under the weight. Of the coven sleeping here among the vines, tendrils like poison growing over them and slowly choking them. 

It could be worse, he reasons to himself, and paces his breathing until his heart is beating a little slower. 

“Vines,” he says at last. Kevin glances around as if he could see them, as if they have any weight in the physical world. Sajeeb is just watching him, a narrow gaze like he can see through Chris's eyes if he just stares hard enough. 

“Where?” he asks and Chris waves mutely all around them. Kevin curses. 

“In the walls too?” Sajeeb asks shrewdly and Chris sighs through his nose. There's a headache building behind his eyes that has nothing to do with overexertion and everything to do with how much work is ahead of them. 

He can feel weight across his shoulders, pressure over his arms and legs, like vines. Crawling over his skin. It's in his head, just a leftover impression from the curse, but it still makes his skin crawl. 

“Maybe,” he mumbles. “Probably. We'd have to knock out drywall to check but I bet it's growing down through the walls of the whole house.” 

“Shit,” Sajeeb says succinctly. He's pacing already. Chris lets himself slide down to lay on his side. He's pulling his wards back into place but it's hard, he's so tired and it's been weeks of taking them down and putting them back up in endless repetition. His bones are humming with it like a struck tuning fork, keyless and nervous. “We'd have to take the whole house apart to get it all out.”

“We need to burn it,” Chris puts in tiredly. The cool hardwood of the floor feels nice when he rubs his cheek against it. “Fire, life. You know, elemental.” 

“We're not burning the house down,” Kevin puts in quickly. “We haven't been paid the full fee yet.”

“Well, yeah,” Chris says, pretending he hadn't been thinking exactly that. 

“It would solve the whole problem,” Sajeeb puts in reasonably and he's grinning when Chris glances over. Kevin makes an exasperated sound and a rude gesture. 

“And it would salt the whole neighborhood with curse taint, if it didn't just level everything for a quarter mile!” he exclaims, pointing between Chris and Sajeeb. “And I noticed you two are just trying to fuck with me, I _see_ what you're doing.”

Sajeeb puts his hands up innocently and Chris laughs, the sound grating his throat a little. It's difficult but he pushes himself up to sit upright. 

“You're imagining things,” he says and knuckles at his eye. “We need solutions, anyway.” 

“Well,” Sajeeb says and frowns. “Some kind of purification ritual, maybe? If we could get it down through the plumbing?” 

“Maybe,” Chris says and he’s already thinking about it. It would be a _lot_ , a whole bucket of sea salt and herbs and maybe even some cinnamon oil to bring the right touch of fire. They’d have to find the water tank and pump it through the whole house to be sure, and even then they couldn’t be certain. 

“Hey, brain trust,” Kevin says tartly and bounces a ball of rolled up paper off Chris’s forehead. “That won’t work.” 

“It could,” Chris argues, because it really could. “We’d have to do it more than once, probably-,” 

“Wouldn’t work,” Kevin interrupts him. “It’s got an anchor.” 

Chris’s mouth snaps shut. 

“What do you mean?” Sajeeb asks. He’s frowning. “Can you see something?” 

“No,” Kevin says. He's got his fists on his hips and he's rolling his eyes and he looks very smug. “But I know more about plants than you and uh, I don't know if you know this? But they have a root source.”

Chris opens his mouth and discovers he has no response. Sajeeb is determinedly looking up at the ceiling like he's pretending neither of them exists. Kevin still looks unbearably smug and Chris would tell him that self satisfaction isn't a good look on him but he thinks that might come across as ungrateful

“So, you know, you could just find and burn that,” Kevin finishes.

* * *

They pick up burgers on the way home because there’s no way any of them can handle the dive necessary to dig up this anchor. Chris isn’t even sure how to go about it, thinks he’ll probably have to have Kevin explain the structure of vines to him a couple of times before he’ll be able to pick out the pattern. He’ll need Sajeeb with him too, to burn away the cling of the vines and keep them from blocking his sight. 

It’s strange, sitting in the car, handing napkins back to Sajeeb, laughing at Kevin dripping ketchup all over himself. It’s strange and unexpected and sweet like xylitol, diet cherry coke on the back of his tongue. 

He smiles into his burger.

* * *

The vines can’t possibly have gotten thicker - that’s not how the magic works, not how this kind of curse can spread - but when he steps back outside himself it feels like they’re choking in tighter than before. They curl in from overhead and he has to duck to keep them from catching at his face. 

He had stepped outside of himself into them because he couldn’t find any place to set up on the top floor that wasn’t this thickly choked in vines. He can’t move without brushing against the toxic foliage. He’s going to be _coated_ in curse taint by the end of this. It’s already there, crawling on his skin, and he lets himself shiver and then brushes off the feeling. 

He can handle it; it’s not real, and it doesn’t matter until after they find the anchor. He’ll have time later to peel the taint away and purify himself. 

He turns back to Sajeeb and Chris. 

Sajeeb is a flare of light like the sun coming up over the horizon. It stings Chris’s vision and he has to look away until the glory of it fades a little, until he can look without feeling like he’s staring into the sun. Kevin is a familiar refuge, and Chris leans into the treelike strength of his magic until his vision has adjusted. 

He reaches out to brush against Sajeeb and he jolts. He can’t see, can’t step outside of himself like Chris, but he can feel Chris like no one else ever has. Can almost hear him. They had always made the best team. 

“Shall we?” Sajeeb says gallantly and Chris grins wolfishly. 

Sajeeb’s voice isn't just _his voice_ , not here. It's layered with singing, notes like piano wires humming to themselves. It’s his magic singing as he stands and burns, a joyous mindless crescendo and decrescendo like waves against a shore. 

Chris should be moving but for a moment he can't stop himself from watching. Like this what he can see of Sajeeb is flickering motion and laughter and a smile that shines slyly. A creature of fire and impossible gravity, a flash of blue like the heart of a flame. 

He sets to work. 

The vines disappear into the walls where they can't reach without opening them up but it hardly matters. They're following the main stalk, Sajeeb clearing the way with his hands like torches, Chris picking through the stalks for the ones that connect and lead deeper. Sajeeb burns where he gestures him to, wordless touches as direction, a machine in tandem. 

Sajeeb can’t see the vines but he doesn’t have to. He only has to follow where Chris leads. He's always been the eyes and Sajeeb has always been the hands. It feels so natural like this. 

Finding the main vine takes them what he thinks is half an hour, though time goes syrupy and slow and uneven in this space. It’s difficult because it runs in and out of the walls and floor, splitting off and digging into any crack it can find. 

When they find the source the main stalk is thick and gnarled and ugly with scarring where it disappears into the floorboards. It's definitely the main stalk, though it's disguised pretty well, a tornado of thick stalks disappearing into the walls and floor and ceiling all around it. Chris examines it for a long time before he's sure, reaching back to tap Sajeeb’s arm and then tugging tiredly at Kevin to be pulled back into his body. 

He's wheezing when he finds himself again. Sajeeb looks only a little better, anemic and winded, limping as he walks gingerly back into the room. 

“In the floorboards,” Chris croaks eventually, and crawls unsteady to his feet. Sajeeb wobbles after him down the hallway, Kevin taking up the rear. There's no sign in this particular room, not that Chris was expecting one. Just smooth honey-lacquered hardwood and sunlight pooling over it in warm waves. 

Kevin has to pull the floorboard up eventually, Chris and Sajeeb both too shaky to do it. It takes some doing but he manages eventually, reaches into the hole and comes up with something wrapped in faded cloth. 

Chris takes it when it’s handed to him. He can feel the power of the curse straining against his hands, pressing up against Chris’s wards, throwing out tendrils of power like vines that aren’t strong enough to break through but are enough to wear him down eventually. 

He unwraps it to examine the anchor. A little wooden figure in the vague shape of a man, a dessicated strip of vine looped around it and tied off with white thread. It sheds bits of dried leaves as he shifts it to look at it more carefully and he flicks his fingers absently to freeze them in the air. 

They catch with a soft whisper and burn for a moment like little stars and he glances at Sajeeb. He isn’t looking back; he’s staring at the anchor with dark, hard eyes. It isn’t a banishment, not yet. It’s just limiting the influence. Chris is grateful anyway.

* * *

Kevin stays back near the car in case banishing the anchor goes badly enough wrong they need backup. 

It’s the final anchor, something close to the last layer of the curse. Chris can feel it in the bald evil radiating from the little figure in his hand, the bad luck and loneliness it tries to slip in under his skin. It’s meant to break things, he can read that much just from the way it presses at him. It’s meant to undermine the foundations. 

“Whoever cast this curse,” he mumbles as Sajeeb starts the fire with a careful snap of his fingers. “They’re a real motherfucker.” 

Sajeeb nods. The fire is reflected back in his eyes until they're nothing but glassy, flickering coals. 

“It's ready,” he says a minute later and steps back from a fire that growls viciously, hungry to burn and consume. Perfect for banishments. Chris steps up beside him and readies himself. 

This time he's prepared, properly prepared, a salt circle and a charm for protection around his neck and everything he didn't spend in finding the anchor thrown into a ward to keep the backlash from touching them. Sajeeb backing him up, less adept at wards but feeding raw power to Chris that rushes through him in branching pulses. 

A heartbeat almost synchronous. It's intimate. He breathes in and Sajeeb breathes with him, in and then out and the anchor dropping into the fire. 

They're ready for it but it still hurts like a motherfucker, years of pent-up anger and misery and nightmares unloading against the wards. Something Chris catches in flashes - a mouth full of needle teeth, blood and steel, darkness to fall into forever, things that catch at his subconscious like fish hooks and drag at him. He braces himself against it, feels Sajeeb at his back, and holds his ground. 

It recedes eventually, leaves him winded. He feels dirty in the aftermath. 

The curse lingers this time despite the banishment. Threaded through him despite the wards, under his nails and part of the smoke in his lungs. He coughs dryly. Tries to shake himself and has to force himself not to start scratching at the itch of things that aren't real drying on his skin because it's all in his head. 

Sajeeb’s hand catches his and he looks up dizzily. 

It steadies him, Sajeeb’s eyes on his, something grounding and real and a little painful. He barely notices the flash of heat against his fingertips. He recognizes Sajeeb burning out infection, anyway. 

He feels a little better when Sajeeb finally steps away. Not good, but like he can make it back to his house where he can cleanse himself more thoroughly. Less like there are ants crawling all over him. 

“I hate when you do that,” Sajeeb mumbles, but Kevin is rushing to bundle them into the car and anyway Chris is too tired to ask. 

He falls asleep a little as soon as he’s sitting down but he wakes up as the car is in motion. They’re both in the backseat and the radio is on, gives him something to ground himself with. There’s music playing quiet but happy. Sajeeb is next to him, and he has hold of Chris’s wrist, fingers pressed against his pulse. 

“It isn't your fucking job to take so much on,” Sajeeb murmurs. He doesn't sound as angry as his words would imply. “I'm strong too, you stupid…”

Chris thinks about saying something, because he's a little tired of people talking at him when he's too fucked up and exhausted to really process it. In the end he’s just too tired, letting go of it all and sinking back into exhausted drowsing.

* * *

He wakes up when Sajeeb is hauling him upright and out of the car, enough that he can walk under his own direction at least. He almost runs into a wall in the lobby but he manages eventually, following Sajeeb down the hallway and handing over the key when Sajeeb gestures for it. He should maybe feel weird about it, the ease of stumbling home with Sajeeb in tow, with how Sajeeb follows him in with the ease of someone who’s been here all along. 

He just doesn’t have it in him. He can move under his own direction now but it’s difficult and he just kind of wants to sit down and maybe cry a little bit. There’s a persistent sharp ache building in his eye sockets. 

The curse is still there, a crawling sensation of his skin, a taint so slick and oily and obvious he’s a little surprised he can’t see it when he looks down at his hands. 

He opens his mouth to tell Sajeeb to help himself to the food in the pantry. 

“Why are you staying here?” is what comes out instead and he can’t pretend what’s driving it isn’t the feverish throb of the curse trying to work itself under his skin and the drumbeat of exhaustion driving him towards irrationality. 

Sajeeb looks at him, shocked and blank and completely unprepared. 

“Chris,” he says, and nothing else. 

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.” Chris’s voice is somehow, despite itself, steady. “There’s hotels and shit. I can take care of myself.” 

He’s being fucking stupid. He knows he is. He’s being a fucking idiot but he just can’t stop himself, can’t catch the words before they’re tripping across his tongue. He doesn’t mean them, never has except in times like this, curse taint digging out every pocket of poison and bile and throwing them into the light. 

Sajeeb looks at him and his face is blank in the way that means he’s hurt, something Chris has said hurt him. It makes Chris’s mouth slam shut with the click of teeth. 

“Chris,” he repeats and then looks away. “I want to be here,” he says at last, after enough time has gone by that Chris has become aware of the way his knees are having to lock to keep him from toppling right over. 

“That isn’t,” Chris says and he can feel the tremble start up through his whole body. He’s just running out again, the rest he’d stolen in the car running out. “You didn’t, before-”

Sajeeb catches him as his knees give out, a warm shoulder he falls into, an arm around his back that feels so nice. He just breathes there for a moment. His heart is going too fast and he counts steadily until it slows. The curse is there, fluttering like a fever, and he pushes it away. 

“I didn’t mean that,” he says at last. 

Sajeeb nods against his hair. He understands, always has. 

“We would have destroyed each other,” he says quietly. Chris nods, forehead rolling gently against the soft swell of Sajeeb’s shoulder. He’s too used up and broken to disagree right now, not when Sajeeb is right and always had been. 

_I still love you,_ he wants to say, _I always will_. But he doesn’t, because he’s exhausted and Sajeeb is right and they don’t need to fight right now, they don’t really need to fight at all. He doesn’t want to fight. He wants to wash off all the clinging tar and blood and misery and then he wants to go to sleep. 

“I have shit for a ritual bath, if you want,” he says softly, words dragging out soft and slow. “You'll feel better.”

Sajeeb doesn't say anything but his hands come up to Chris's shoulders and pushes at him until he drags himself upright. His eyes are searching on Chris's face. 

“Just the ritual,” he says at last and Chris's eyes close despite themselves in relief.

* * *

The ritual is easy for them still, even after all this time. Sajeeb running the water just hot enough to steam up the mirrors, Chris getting down his big jars of salt, lavender, mint and chamomile from their high shelves to mix into the water. It's an easy dance, even in a bathroom unfamiliar to Sajeeb and too familiar to Chris. 

The salt goes in first, a big handful and Chris is close to used up but this magic is easy. Just a touch of will, the effort of turning a page in a book and the salt is settling into the water and the tension of carrying the taint of so much malevolence on his shoulders is already easing. The herbs next, haphazard, Sajeeb handing them to him wordlessly. He barely looks at them as he's tossing them in, just stirs the water with a flick of his fingers and then it's ready. 

He’s grateful, abruptly, that when he bought the apartment he’d somehow found one with a tub big enough that both of them won’t be pressed against each other. They’ve managed in worse, but… things had been different then. They’d been different. 

He sheds his clothes without pretense, tosses them carelessly onto the toilet seat and barely holds back a hurting groan as he steps into the bath. It's the perfect temperature, of course. Warm enough that all his muscles unlock and he has to fold to his knees and get himself sitting down before he falls over. 

The water wakes him up a little bit, lends him some strength to tilt his head back to gesture Sajeeb in too. 

For a moment Sajeeb is a stranger. For a moment Chris doesn't recognize him, this tall man, skin gleaming with sweat, face remote and gaze somewhere Chris can't follow. He's a stranger, someone Chris barely knows anymore. He could be anyone. 

“I'm not washing your hair for you,” Chris says instead of panicking, instead of demanding Sajeeb make himself the way he’d been before. “You grew that shit, you're dealing with it.”

Sajeeb laughs and the moment is gone, he's Sajeeb again, pinking a little and shrugging self-consciously before shuffling out of his pants. 

Chris still wants to make him tell Chris everything. Everything he's done, every moment of his life Chris didn't get to see. He wants to understand Sajeeb again. But it can wait. It has to wait. This isn't the time for it. 

Sajeeb leaves his boxers on and steps in cautiously, settles back against the side opposite Chris. He doesn't make a sound but Chris watches his eyes flutter shut like he can't help himself. 

“I hate,” Sajeeb says, voice uneven with exhaustion, and then he’s settling deeper into the bath until he’s peering over his knees at Chris. “I hate curses.” 

He says it like he’s worried it’s going to offend Chris. Chris laughs and splashes a hand in the tub a little. 

“Me too,” he says easily. “I didn’t get into cursebreaking ‘cause I _like_ them.” 

Sajeeb nods solemnly. He’s staring still, all dark doe-eyes, trailing his fingers through the silky water in little ripples. There’s something searching about it, something a little raw. 

Chris doesn’t want to look at it and so he doesn’t. He looks down instead, tests the water with a touch of the sight and breathes out when it shines warm and pure around them. 

“I’ll do you if you do me,” he bargains and it’s a mark of how tired they both are that no one makes a joke about it. Sajeeb just smiles tiredly, shrugs with one shoulder and cups his hands to dip out enough of the water to pour over Chris’s head. 

It’s slow, and quiet except for the splash of water, Sajeeb muttering the traditional words under his breath as he goes. Chris keeps his eyes closed and feels the weight fall from his chest and shoulders as the water touches him. The last of it falls away before Sajeeb has reached the last of the ritual but he lets it finish anyway, floating in the quiet of released tension. 

He doesn’t speak when he clumsily returns the favor for Sajeeb. He doesn’t need to, the words blazoned in his mind by repetition after repetition. It’s easy and nearly heartbreaking. 

Sajeeb’s eyes are on him the whole time, watching him with a distant exhaustion and something Chris can’t read and doesn’t bother trying. For now they’re okay in this little circle of the bath and the ritual and the tarry remains of the curse washing down the drain. 

Sajeeb smiles when Chris finishes. Chris wants to reach out to touch but he doesn’t, heaves himself to his feet instead. 

He's feeling alright, drowsing a little bit as he steps out of the bath, and it isn't until he's stumbling and nearly falling that he realizes he was trying to navigate his apartment with his eyes closed. Sajeeb catches him, as much weakness in the care he has to take easing Chris upright as Chris feels threatening in his muscles. 

He guides Chris mutely to his room. Chris wonders tiredly how he'd done it the last time, when Chris had been unconscious and probably so far under it must have been terrifying. 

Sajeeb sits him on the bed and stands back and they just look at each other for a moment. 

“Goodnight,” Sajeeb says, and closes the bedroom door behind him as he leaves.

* * *

“We should talk,” Sajeeb says and Chris winces and sets down his mug. 

He’d woken up first, snuck into the bathroom and showered away the salt and herbs and leftover magic stuck to his skin, scrubbed until what of Sajeeb’s scent had stuck to him is gone. It had helped a little, settled him back into reality, given him a measure of perspective. Enough that he hadn’t taken the earliest train he could out to the office before Sajeeb could wake up. 

“Kay,” he says. 

Sajeeb looks better than he had, at least. More put together, less like he’s about to topple under his own weight. The sleep deprivation has receded from under his eyes. 

“If you feel, you know, up to it,” Sajeeb says, quieter. Chris shakes himself and turns to face him fully across the warm expanse of his kitchen. It’s almost deja vu. 

“I’m sorry about last night,” he says, level and swallowing against the surge of defensive embarrassment. _So unprofessional_ , letting a curse get into him like that. Unprofessional, and stupid, not being able to stop himself from spewing bile between them and forcing this conversation. 

Sajeeb is just looking at him. He’s got his hands in the pockets of his pajama pants, his bare feet sticking out of where the legs are just a little too long. 

“You don’t need to apologize,” he says. Chris shrugs. 

“I do,” he says. 

“It happens,” Sajeeb says and it’s a little too permissive, it doesn’t sit right with Chris. 

“It won’t happen again,” he says, and means it. It won’t catch him by surprise again. This time Sajeeb doesn’t argue. He just looks, looks at Chris and Chris doesn’t want to meet his eyes but he forces himself to. It’s very, very hard. 

“I didn’t want to talk about that,” Sajeeb says at last. His gaze doesn’t waver. “I want to, I just… need to know, what you meant? When you said about… before.” 

They lack the vocabulary for this. They lack the words for it, for the time before the end of the world, for the time while it was ending, the time after that when they had done the impossible and saved the world but everything had been somehow even worse. And then the time after all of that, the time where Chris had healed. They don’t know how to talk about it. 

“We can just forget about it,” he says and winces. It sounds defensive even though he hadn’t meant it to. It’s not possible anyway. Neither of them have stellar records for letting things go. 

“I just want to understand,” Sajeeb says. His gaze still doesn’t waver. His voice is more quiet than ever. 

“...I don't know if… I even know what I was talking about,” Chris says, unwilling, and he knows it's a mistake when Sajeeb doesn't look away. 

“Don't lie,” Sajeeb says, soft and hurting, and it turns out that Chris can't maintain eye contact. 

“It's not really anything,” Chris says and then winces; he can feel Sajeeb stiffen without even looking. “Really, it's just… Old shit. You, plus the curse, and I'm not… used to it.”

Sajeeb stays quiet. There's something about the way he watches Chris that Chris can feel even though he can't see it. 

“It's weird having you here,” he says at last, quietly. He can look in Sajeeb’s direction even if he can't meet his eyes, he discovers. It's something. 

He watches Sajeeb decide to let go of pretense, the tightness in his jaw. How he straightens up, shoulders squaring, his knuckles going white and then flushed. Weight being shouldered. 

“I didn't think it would be so hard on you if I, I… When I left,” he says, and Chris hauls in a breath that doesn't feel like it reaches his lungs. 

“It wasn't _fun_ ,” Chris mutters. It's taking more effort than he likes not to just bolt. It's taking painful effort to keep his eyes up. “Even if it was the right thing to do.”

“I didn't… before, it didn't feel like you'd changed at all,” Sajeeb mumbles. Some strand in Chris's chest yanks tight. “Or, you didn't need to. You were so, god, comfortable.” 

“I was _comfortable_?” Chris says incredulously, because he can remember the time right after they'd sewn shut the rift in the world, after they'd turned away from godhood and settled back into their humanity. He can remember the fear and the confusion, the way his body hadn't been his for so long he'd started to wonder if it ever would be again. He remembers disconnect so vast that he would blink and realize he had been riding the train for three hours in endless circles, staring at nothing, utterly insensate. 

He doesn't remember being comfortable. If anything, he remembers how Sajeeb had seemed to understand his own humanity better than Chris ever had, the quiet way he had settled into his new role like the old one had never happened. 

It had seemed like there hadn't been enough room for Chris. It had seemed like an impossible task to make room for himself. 

When Sajeeb had quietly said that it wasn't working any more, the two of them, it had been as much relief as heartbreak. Sajeeb had been right. He'd always been right. 

He’s better now. No more days where he wakes up and his body feels like it’s not his. No more days where it’s all he can do to stay inside his own skin, where all he can manage is to tuck his blankets over his head and hold his spirit inside his body because if he went wandering he wouldn’t come back. It’s only a few minutes here and there, now, too long spent projecting or without eating. 

It’s better. He’s healthier. Healthier than he would have been with Sajeeb as a crutch, both of them dragging each other down. 

“I was _comfortable,_ ” he repeats, not a question this time. 

Sajeeb won’t meet his eyes. This, more than anything else, is what makes Chris angry. 

He’s opening his mouth to say something that’s baking its way up his throat like bile and poison, something ugly and hurtful that he knows he’ll regret, when Sajeeb finally looks at him. 

“I didn’t realize,” he says and it takes the anger right out of Chris. Neat and easy and painful, gutting like a fish. 

They’re left looking at each other. It feels, just a little bit, like it’s his first time seeing Sajeeb. 

He looks tired. Tired, and sad, and worn-down in a way that has nothing to do with the past two weeks. It looks like two years of near-constant travel handled better than it could be but still not well. Hair long and curly and untamed. Comfortable clothes, soft dry hands, and eyes rimmed red and sore. 

“I didn’t know,” he continues when Chris doesn’t speak, can’t find his voice to speak. “I was so scared and I didn’t, I didn’t... know how to talk about it. I didn’t want to hurt you with my own shit and I guess I just, just… didn’t realize maybe you were going through shit just as bad.” 

“I mean to be fair,” Chris says, and he’s shaking, he realizes this as he lifts a hand to run through his hair because he can’t stay still. “I was doing the same fucking thing.” 

Sajeeb nods, a dip of his chin so jerky it looks involuntary. His eyes are so big. Big and dark and sorry, so sorry. 

“We were,” he says at last and his voice is throaty, a little thick, like he’s holding back the tears but it’s effort. “So, so fucking stupid.” 

Chris laughs, torn from his chest in a way that stings. 

“We were kids,” he says and he feels raw like a wound, like it’s his first time saying that, like it’s the first time he’s believed it even though he’s been repeating it for the two years since two stupid, powerful children saved the world all alone. “It’s, I think, it’s allowed.” 

Sajeeb laughs too, a little choked sound. He reaches out for a moment and then stops, lowers his hand, an aborted movement Chris is grateful for. It’s good to know he wants to touch, even if Chris thinks he couldn’t handle it just yet. 

There’s something gone from his chest, some painless blunt weight that he’d forgotten was sitting just under his lungs, nudging up against his heart. Something entirely disparate from magic. He feels freer. He feels like he can breathe. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, quietly, and he doesn’t mean for the night before this time. Sajeeb understands or at least this time he doesn’t argue, just nods and twitches again like he wants to reach out. 

“I am too,” he says, and Chris knows he means it.

* * *

Kevin stares at him intently for long enough that Chris starts to get nervous, when they finally make it back to the office, but he doesn’t say anything and Chris is grateful. Instead he just throws a stack of notes that none of them have really referenced into the back of the car and stares some more. 

Sajeeb takes the backseat and Chris is too aware of how often he glances back at him, how often Sajeeb is looking at him back. It’s uncomfortable, exciting, a little too grade-school crush and Chris savors it anyway. 

“Can we please be careful this time,” Kevin asks and Chris leans across the console to elbow him and it’s normal, mostly, except better. It feels good. 

They pull up and the curse is a sucking drain like a blot of darkness out of the corner of Chris’s vision. He can feel it across the street, so concentrated in its last layer, so straightforwardly evil without the refraction of so many layers obscuring its intent. 

He climbs out and stretches luxuriously in the sun. He feels good. Nothing can take him, not like this, foolhardy and reckless and drunk on the possibilities that have nothing to do with the curse at all really. 

Sajeeb nudges him in passing and smiles at him and there’s no secrets or promises in it, only happiness and anticipation. 

Kevin passes him and stares some more with narrow-eyed suspicion belied by the tiny smile tucked into the corner of his mouth. Chris winks at him, giddy and overblown, and Kevin rolls his eyes and continues toward the house. 

“This layer will be to the West, probably,” Chris muses when they’ve carted everything Kevin’s fussing has determined they might need into the front hall. 

No one is home today, which Chris is a little grateful. The last layer; he’ll eat a shoe if it isn’t trapped to hell and back and set up to eat a cursebreaker to boot. They don’t need bystanders getting in the way and then getting eaten by the curse. Chris suspects he and Kevin’s insurance won’t like covering that. 

“I don’t think it’s out in the yard,” Kevin puts in. His head is tilted like he’s listening to conversation in the next room, straining to catch the words. “I’m not hearing anything, anyway. Probably inside.” 

Chris shrugs and starts making his way towards the stairs to the basement. 

“Won’t know if we don’t look,” he throws back over his shoulder. 

There’s nothing in the basement. Nothing in the ground floor either, Chris dancing between his body and his sight and frowning harder the longer they go without spying any sign of the curse. He can _feel_ it, hanging heavy all around them, but when he reaches out to try to touch it, to pin it down, it slips through his fingers like smoke. 

Sajeeb is watching him as much as the house, the line between his eyebrows deepening as the hours wear on. 

“Top floor,” Chris says tersely and Sajeeb puts a hand on his shoulder for a bare moment before heading for the stairs. 

There’s nothing there either. 

He kicks a baseboard in frustration and then feel awful about it, prods at the scuff on the white paint with his toe. Sajeeb is in the other room but Kevin is there, keeping a careful distance but his magic reaching across it in silent reassurance. 

“It’ll wash off,” he hazards at last and Chris is just rolling his eyes and opening his mouth to say something probably kind of shitty when Sajeeb’s voice rings from the other room. 

“I found the attic!” he’s saying and Chris is already moving. 

It’s a little closet Chris has no idea how he’d overlooked except there are the shreds of a subtle, gossamer little misdirection glamour hanging around the doorframe. It hadn’t stood up to Sajeeb; Chris can see the scorch of a handprint in the middle of the door when he slips into his sight for a moment. 

“You’re explaining that to Victoria,” he declares, pointing at the handprint, and Sajeeb just shrugs with an unrepentant grin. 

“I found the last layer,” he answers and Chris really doesn’t have any smart remark to make about that. 

It isn’t an attic; ceiling too low, the beams of the roof exposed, too dusty and unfinished. It’s barely a crawlspace, and cluttered with old empty cardboard boxes and dust, unlit except for the light coming up from the stairway behind him. The curse hangs heavy over the entire thing, almost a ripple in the air, warping everything like an old mirror. 

It’s centered on the far west wall and he ventures in cautiously, kicking a box forward in front of him. Kevin and Sajeeb follow. It’s an empty room, though. Nothing that he can see until Kevin is making his way towards the dangling chain of the bare lightbulb and yanking it to flickering, faulty-wiring life. 

He sees the mirrors before Kevin, the dim glint of them, dusty and tucked back behind the eaves. Hidden, facing each other, a fucking _trap_. 

“ _No-_ ,” Sajeeb barks and reaches out to yank Kevin back but it puts him off balance and his foot lands between the mirrors. 

For a second the world lurches and Chris can feel the way reality is tearing, the way Sajeeb is suddenly doubling over and then he's crumbling away and Chris reaches out and grabs hold and is yanked into a hurricane. 

Everything is motion and then everything is stillness. 

He is on his hands and knees in dry, powdery snow. 

The place he crawls to his feet in is dead and empty and cold, a plane of gentle rolling white hillocks as far as he can see in every direction. Windless, the air so still and dry and frigid it burns in his lungs. The sky above them is another grey plane, featureless, flat and claustrophobic. 

It isn’t real. It’s a pocket, someplace physical and yet not, and when he pushes out with his sight he can’t see the edges of it. 

He shivers and draws himself back into his body as much as he can and jolts in shock when it isn’t as far back in as he’d expected. His body hangs around him in wet weight but he can feel everything against his spirit in a shock of cold if he moves too fast. He turns to Sajeeb slowly and Sajeeb looks human except that he turns his head to look at Chris and he's lit up inside like everything under his skin is on fire. 

The whole of this world is white and grey and against it Sajeeb is fire and color so rich it hurts in Chris's teeth. 

He's glorious. He's so beautiful, this kaleidoscope creature of Sajeeb’s face and his fire. He’s shivering like a seizure. Chris reaches out to touch his arm and Sajeeb jolts, nearly falls over with the force of it. 

The cold is already draining Sajeeb. He's shuddering, hands becoming fists at his sides, face gone tight against the dead, still cold of this place. His breath is a hot cloud around him and Chris remembers the way his body puts out heat, burning desperate and bright and impossible to sustain in this place. 

“We need to keep moving,” he says and snatches Sajeeb’s hand. It's cooler than he likes and Sajeeb’s fingers tightening around his are already too weak. “Kevin will get us out or, fuck, I'll. I'll think of something, just get moving.”

Sajeeb doesn't say anything but he does nod, stumbles into motion when Chris tugs on his hand again. 

They walk for a time that without a frame of reference means nothing. It feels like a long time, that’s all Chris knows, it feels like a little eternity. He doesn’t even know if time exists here. His heart is beating, or at least there is the phantom sensation of it beating. They are the only thing that changes in the landscape. 

He’s going numb. His feet had stopped burning with the chill a long time ago, his hand in Sajeeb’s aching with the cold and the other stinging where he has it tucked under his armpit. More than that the parts of himself where he doesn’t quite match up to his skin are fading and going numb too, the edges of his spirit freezing still and empty. 

Sajeeb stumbles and then his hand is yanking out of Chris’s and Chris turns slowly, sluggish with the cold, thinking he's going to have to pull Sajeeb to his feet-

Sajeeb is on his hands and knees in the snow and he's flickering, flickering, guttering like he's about to go out. 

Chris slides to his knees beside him a moment later, pawing at him with hands so numb, so far gone that even the nearly gone fire under Sajeeb’s skin burns. His head is hanging from his shoulders, loose and limp, swinging when Chris manages to close clumsy fingers around his shoulder and haul him up. 

His eyes are thin slits of dark glass, black ice, there's no spark in him at all.

The slap rings out in the silence, echoes across the expanse of snow and dies in the deadness of so much space. Chris's palm stings with the impact and the cold and he's panting for breath because the panic is choking away all the room in his lungs. Their breath hangs around them in a cloud that doesn’t move or dissipate, only sinks slowly down towards the snow. 

Sajeeb makes a wounded little noise and jerks against Chris's hand but he sparks again, eyes opening a little to see Chris. 

When he discovers he can't haul in enough air to make words he gives up on them and forces his fingers to curl instead, to haul Sajeeb forward until they're kneeling together in the snow. Pressed against each other from knee to chest, and he can't be much warmer than the air around them but it has to be something. It _has_ to be enough. 

“C-come on,” he implores against the cold of Sajeeb’s cheek. “We can do this, you can d-do this, wake the fuck _up_.” 

Sajeeb sighs in his ear. His breath is cold but it's there, it's something, the flicker of his eyelashes against Chris's skin the only thing that matters. 

“C-come on, you fu-fucking asshole,” he's shaking so hard his voice comes out shuddering but he forces it through his chattering teeth anyway, “I just g-got you back, you c-can't die now.”

Sajeeb stirs, eyelashes flickering again, “I knew you were waiting for me.” 

His voice is a frayed thread. He isn’t even shivering. Chris clings tighter. 

“You're s-such a dick,” he breathes and shifts a stiff hand to paw Sajeeb into sitting up enough he can look at him. 

Sajeeb blinks at him tiredly. He's so dim he's barely there, guttering and ready to go out. His eyes can barely focus. He's so cold already that when he sighs his breath doesn't even cloud. 

“We saved the f-fucking world,” Chris says softly. “We can ha-handle a fucking curse.”

Sajeeb’s eyes close and then open, glacier-slow. 

“It's,” he breathes and doesn't continue for a long moment. “So cold.”

He’s fading again. Chris can feel it in his own chest. 

For a moment Sajeeb’s lips are cold and still under his, a soft rush of cool air against his cheek. 

He keeps kissing him, keeps pressing Sajeeb to him. Gets a hand around the back of his neck and reached out with everything he has left in him to burn, praying for _something_. To get through to Sajeeb. 

He feels the moment the fire catches. 

It's a sigh against his mouth, Sajeeb heating under his hands, and then there's burning fingers threading through his hair and he's being dragged impossibly closer. 

Sajeeb kisses back like he drowning, like he's burning for Chris, like he's finally remembered he'd almost been a god once upon a time and holy fire still runs in his veins. Its overwhelming, undoing, Chris is screaming joyously into a kiss that isn't mouths anymore so much as Chris breathing Sajeeb into himself in pulses of heat that burn away the concept of body until-

It's easy to let go. It's easy to leap into the fire that is Sajeeb. It’s always been easy; Sajeeb’s core open to him like a book, like a room he can step inside, a neutron star in a man’s body. 

They roar like a wildfire and expand out and out and-

The mirrors break and Chris and Sajeeb spill across the floor. 

They’re back in their bodies but not entirely, not really. Chris sees the shards of the mirror on the floor around them like jagged teeth and also the holes in reality hanging from the mirror’s frame, he sees Sajeeb stirring beside him and he also sees the creature of wildfire that is Sajeeb’s magic not quite contained in his skin. 

He can see everything. He can see like he can dimly remember seeing, in the moments he’d been about to become a god, teetering on the brink of something so great he can’t remember it except in feverish flashes. The physical reality of the world and then the shades behind that, his vision doubling impossibly. 

The curse is broken. Chris can feel it, can see it in the way light passes through the air. It’s broken. 

Kevin is scrambling across the floor to them. He’s on his hands and knees and Chris sees the moment he cuts his palm and keeps going to get an arm around Sajeeb, reaching out to touch Chris. He’s crying, or he just stopped crying, his cheeks are wet and there’s salt frozen in his beard Chris reaches out to paw at dizzily. It refracts the light. He isn’t used to seeing like this and it’s impossible to follow. 

Something shifts in the negative space the mirrors frame. 

It’s big.

He picks up Kevin with a sweep of his arm and a clumsy surge of magic - weakness burned out of him, humanity barely an adjacent concept, the revelatory deja vu in the way he feels power move through him - and throws him across the glittering glass teeth. Sajeeb is paying no attention, knowing that he doesn't need to, knows what Chris is doing. He's throwing down wards over the mouths of the mirrors, no finesse and no need for finesse, cinderblock monstrosities of strength. 

Chris spares a thought to appreciate the utter lack of workmanship, working to find his mouth. 

“Rrrr,” he says, slurring. He can barely feel it like this but the fleshy weight of his body is stiff with fear magic, stinking unholy terror magic. It doesn't make it easy to operate his jaw. “Rrr. Rruh, run, _run_.”

He doesn't wait to see if Kevin does because the thing slams into Sajeeb’s wards and the whole house shudders in its foundations. 

Sajeeb is fighting it back with a burn like a pyroclastic flow and it buys Chris the time he needs. Brief microseconds, no time to turn or run to Sajeeb and so he reaches both fists into the weft of reality and jumps to brings them together. 

He's not good at it - Sajeeb was better at it, the brute force of bending spacetime until it snaps - but there is no time to remember this and no room to fail. 

He brings them both back a little, out from between the two broken holes in reality, shielded a little from crossfire. Sajeeb is burning deeper, the air around him superheating, and Chris steps closer with no fear. Sajeeb won't hurt him, can't hurt him. 

A burning hand catches his cheek and he feels the moment his flesh should burn away and doesn't. Instead, he turns in Sajeeb’s grip and looks. 

It punches free of the wards in a motion. Something that flashes and shines wetly in the light through the narrow windows, slapping around for a moment, planting itself on the floor and dragging the rest of it through. 

It’s horrible. 

It’s nothing his brain wants to process, the truest version of the writhing miserable wrongness of the famine spirit, the original from which it had sprung. A boiling mass of rancid meat punctuated by gaping lipless mouths, teeth like an angler fish but shining like steel, blossoming out like awful flowers and snapping at the air before sinking back into the liquid motion of its body. 

It’s a demon. It’s a fucking demon, there’s a fucking chaos elemental dragging itself towards them, one slapping wet appendage at a time. 

There is a split moment in time, a beat where Chris remembers the shape of the curse. What he’d thought had been a curse. Concentric rings. A knot, a maze, choking vines. Layers for hiding and containing. Not a curse at all, clever, so clever. A lock to hold this thing inside, unpleasant enough to drive people away from it. 

A door on the ground floor slams and some sensibility left of _Chris_ relaxes a little. 

Kevin will call for help. There are solutions, teams in place for this. Witches without the power of the two of them but with the proper spells, the right training. All they have to do is contain it. To keep it from hurting anyone else. 

The thing howls and moves and Sajeeb throws up a hand to block it and screams. 

It moves like fucking lightning, latching onto floor and walls and propelling itself forward, scuttling movement like a spider. Impossibly fast, disgusting, Chris can’t focus on it properly until Sajeeb’s wards are splintering and the thing is howling over them. 

Its magic is like needles, the cold of contaminated surgical tools, snapping against the wards and nearly crushing through. Sajeeb stumbles behind him, slides to a knee beside him, and then his wards fail again and Chris is reaching out to throw another ward in front of him but it’s too slow. 

The snap of one of the thing’s awful fleshy tendrils impacting flesh and the ward comes up in time to throw the demon back but Sajeeb is a heap on the floor behind him when he chances a glance and he’s on his knees before he can think it through. Getting a hand on Sajeeb’s face, Sajeeb’s eyes opening blearily and focusing past him with dawning panic, and Chris’s ward rings out as the demon strikes it and then strikes through. 

He throws out another ward, too weak, too slow, turning back to look, his hand coming up-

It’s right there and he throws himself back but it’s fast, it’s so impossibly fucking fast without the wards slowing it down. The thing has teeth like tombstones, teeth for hurting, sharp like needles. They close around his hand, outstretched still, trying to throw up some protective ward. 

He is somewhere very good. 

It is a sense of well-being all through him, goodness spreading through him until he's just numb with it. Ecstasy in rising crescendoes, euphoria so earthly it can only be celestial, a mantra of words running over his tongue and back down his throat telling him that he should give up, it is right to give up, what he is feeling is love. 

There is a shudder through the whole of him, a ripple in the fabric of his self. It's a ripple of disgust. 

The thing tears free of him with a scream of frustration and he throws it back across the whole of the room. 

They’ve switched places somehow, Sajeeb kneeling next to him in a halo of burning air, molecules of dust flaring in the heat of him as a glittering constellation of miniscule flames. The glass around his knees is melting, molten droplets pooling and smoldering in the floorboards. The fear dawning on his face is heartbreaking and rage bursts in Chris's chest more for that than what the demon had tried to do. 

Corruption hits his body like a truck and as it rolls over and starts to puke he detaches from it, ruthlessly throws his spirit upright and lashes his tether to Sajeeb. Sajeeb is on his feet a moment later. What Chris can see of him is a neutron star putting off flares in looping haloes. It should hurt to look at. 

His body is seizing now and he turns away from it to glance at the whirling black hole of the demon. It is an orbiting constellation of mouths, teeth, clawing hands that form and dissolve sickeningly. It shrieks, not with its mouths but as a cicada shrieks, parts of it vibrating against other parts of it until the friction screams. 

It’s dark, dark like the absence of light. Dark, and impure and dirty, shedding corruption like snow. 

He reaches into Sajeeb. 

Watching Sajeeb gutter hurts, as he pulls out fire handful after handful, but he lets Chris do it and puts what Chris doesn’t take into the ward holding the demon at the other end of the room. 

_trust me_ , he whispers to Sajeeb and Sajeeb doesn’t answer but Chris thinks, though it’s difficult to see it through the obscuring brilliance of his fire, that he’s nodding. He makes no move to stop Chris, anyway. 

There is holy fire in his hands when he’s finished. 

Where it touches him his spirit is forged into something like a shape, flame leaking out through what has become his fingers and licking up his wrists, purifying and awful to hold. It’s leaving burns, thick patches of shining magical residue where it’s flickering up his arms, but he ignores that. 

Sajeeb’s ward fails again with a crack and then the thump of a body hitting the floor. Sajeeb. It’s Sajeebs body but Chris doesn’t turn because he doesn’t have time. He steps forward instead, into the path of the demon charging, and throws out a hand full of holy fire. 

It runs into his hand like the dumb animal of corruption and hate it is. 

A mouth closes around his hand and he screams and behind him his body screams too in a bestial echo, but he forces the fire in anyway. Pushes and pushes, needles in with the foreignness of Sajeeb’s fire until his hand is empty and he’s left limp, a process that takes all of a moment. 

The thing burns like a coal mine, a rolling swell veining through its flesh, tunneling through it along every weak point. It’s quick, only seconds, can’t be even half a minute, but it’s teeth are sinking into the memory of his skin, down into the bones of his wrist, nothing solid but agony like nothing he knows how to comprehend-

The mouth around his hand opens in a shriek that vibrates in his bones and he doesn’t throw himself away from it so much as collapse backwards. The demon is writhing behind him, quick senseless thrashing, the fire inside it multiplying and ripping hotter and hotter as Chris drags himself away. 

Sajeeb is a heap a few feet from his body. To Chris’s vision a pile of coals, spreading ash as Sajeeb’s magic tries to burn through the curse taint. 

He makes his way back to his body, settles back into himself. The thudding wetwork of his skin and muscle and organ. It’s nausea in his gut and the aching sting of his muscles releasing for the first time in too long. It _hurts_ and it takes him too long to be able to hear the demon’s death over his own gasping for breath through it. 

He rolls himself over with an effort that leaves him panting. 

The demon is a hill of wet, smouldering flesh. Slack mouths, teeth shining in the light of the fire behind them. It is still except for the sporadic shudder of some lost nerve turning into charcoal. He doesn’t know if it’s dead. He doesn’t care, there’s nothing left for them to do, and he thinks the danger has passed one way or the other. 

He turns himself over again onto his stomach and gets his elbows under him and starts to crawl. 

Sajeeb is a smoulder under the oily cling of tainted magic and roasted demon flesh. He’s shaking. He watches Chris come through slitted eyes and there are tear tracks raw and wet through the dust caked to his face. There’s firelight reflecting on his cheeks, filgreed through his lashes, warm and desperate. 

Chris doesn’t have it in him to reach out, to try to touch, to do anything with finesse, and so he just collapses bodily on top of him. Knees and then hands and then all of him falling into the fire of Sajeeb. It’s warm, and Sajeeb’s arm comes around his waist to draw him in, and the stiff acidic tension melts out of him in a hurting rush. 

They fit together in a disorderly sprawl, knees knocking, Chris’s cheek against Sajeeb’s collarbone, a hand under his shirt, Sajeeb’s hair in his mouth. He’s found the other side of exhaustion, a weight on him that he can barely breathe through, and he’s sick down to his core with the evil tainted magic on both of them. 

It doesn’t matter. There are sirens in the distance. Help, coming. 

“Love you,” Sajeeb murmurs.


End file.
